There is solace in this tunnel we are sliding down. We hurtle on its icy walls towards the depth of a steely winter, and there is no way to claw ourselves back upwards, and no way to slow this inevitable speed.
But humans make do, don’t they.
They invent traditions, and make things to keep the darkness at bay. Lights, blankets, fluffy hot water bottles.
We keep the cold at bay, and enjoy the beauty of winter.
Remember that guy who said he would walk five hundred miles, and then five hundred more, just to be the guy who walked a thousand miles to fall at her door? Talk about unrealistic love.
Which young person dreamed up a grand romance only to crash down onto the ebony rocks of a fearsome shore when they were confronted with the harsh realisation that it wasn’t true, that it never would be?
He rolled his eyes at this. Here she goes again. Soon she would lament that he had not given her a handwritten card for their anniversary. He braced himself, and there it came. There it was. A small sharp sentence covered in thorns, aimed expertly at him, and thrown with exceptional accuracy. Why, she was a master at this trick. It hit its target alright, and it was laced with poison, for he immediately tasted something sour in his mouth, and a little ghoul settled itself around his heart and squeezed it maliciously.
He threw his fair share of thorns, too, he supposed. He laced them with poison also. Sometimes the green poison of jealousy. Sometimes the fiery poison of fury. Sometimes it was just plain old hurt.
The hurt we give. Without thinking, mostly. Not realising it escalates into something larger. Like a giant saucer hanging ominously over the earth, it feels too late to take the thorns back because they build up into something elephantine. A literal elephant in the room.
And you pick at it and pick at it each day and it’s like a fungi, exploding into something else.
One day he wasn’t tired though. He stood by the window one morning. It was exceptionally cloudy, but exceptionally beautiful, because the sunlight fought majestically that day for its glorious life, and lit up the world in a hazy, wintry light, shining through the thin shroud of cloud, and giving life to the dead wintry earth below.
And he realised something, when he saw her step out into the back garden with her basket of freshly washed clothes piled high, to hang in the frigid air and become cold and crisp. Her clothes and his. She began pegging the laundry onto the washing line. Her blouse, his trousers, his shirt, a pair of thick white socks he got for her last winter because two of her toes refused to circulate blood in the cold and became numb. Hers and his. She glanced up at the window, saw him, smiled. He smiled back.
And he realised that the thorns were a prerequisite to the bed of rosebushes they had built together.
I have figured out how to enjoy the morose and sombre winter, folks.
You have to just not live in a city.
During the November challenge last year, I wrote this post about winter being depressing, and as I write now with the view of the beautiful countryside in front of me, I feel the truth of winter joy. I feel like I love the cold air, I love when it’s cloudy and the clouds drape themselves over the distant hills like soft fluffy scarves. I love the wind so violent and wild, pummelling trees so they always turn inland. I love the sea, smashing wildly against the edge of the wall of an inland bay, the spray sailing high above my head.
On the Isle, I have taken my children out in the biting cold every single day. Rain, wind, storm, sunshine, snow. They have loved it, of course. I have never known my children to complain about being outdoors.
Makes me more determined to get out in nature everyday. Even when I am back home, and nature is not as wild and beautiful as it is on this Isle on the Irish sea. Just have to drag myself and do it!
Being in the countryside in the winter makes me feel the depth of the beauty described by the Victorian authors who used weather and nature as the emotional setting driving their stories.
We haven’t woken up to a thin coating of delicate ice crystals on the petals of late-October flowers. Not yet.
But soon frost with blow her icy breath and the night under the stars will be bejewelled. Glistening pavements and privet leaves dusted, coated, delicately enshrouded.
Soon.
I began this month feeling hopeful; we had just emerged from a particularly warm October. Indian summer. Evenings shorter but not quite cold enough to realise the inevitability of the hibernation season. Then as November progressed, I succumbed to the misery of short evenings and lack of vitamin D. It was mostly due to not getting out as often as I would like. It’s being too cold, my worry over bundling children up, a myriad of things. But we have reached the end of November, and are hurtling towards the middle of winter, and I find myself resigned to the season. Not just resigned, but gathering some hope in it. Seeing the beauty in the darkness.
Like how the stars glitter in the black sky.
Like how bright the moon is on clear nights.
Like how beautiful the icy crystals of frost as they decorate everything the sun does not touch.
How the water has frozen in the watering can, and what a beautiful pattern icicles make on the shed windows. How the leaves crunch when they’re frozen as opposed to when they’re dry. How the birds still find a way to chirp when the very air feels laden with cold.
How the mornings are hazy, clouds of mist billowing over the grass, ice in the atmosphere, in our very breath. The landscape is magical when the sun chooses to reveal herself.
But even when it is cloudy, the scenery revealed by the lack of dense foliage on trees can be breathtaking.
November has been kind to me this year. Patient with my tantrums. Holding space for my impatience. Much kinder than I have been to her – to winter in general – heck, even to my family.
I leave November a little sombre. Deep in reflection. Hoping to be more kind of spirit as December knocks a cold fist at the door.
How was your November?
I miss summer, with its sudden thunderstorms and endless light.
Hot, silent, still.
The grass crackles and folds and pales under the glare of a ferocious sun.
And then the rain gushes down in a torrent akin to a waterfall. As quickly as it started, an invisible tap turns off, clouds scudding away to reveal the bluest skies.
Endless deep contemplation in the vast azure.
Stretching over the world and into the distance.
Paling even as it speeds away, until it dissolves into ethereal nothingness.
Hours seem endless, meditation and reflection come with ease. Welcoming atmosphere. Gentle breeze.
I suppose there is a beauty to autumn too. Summer has to burn itself out, and bow to the change in season. Accept the rain, accept age. Accept that life must stand still after months of ravenous growth.
There is a beauty to lashings of endless rain, droplets light enough to dust eyelashes like the smallest jewels. Smooth conkers, waterlogged grass, windfalls aplenty. Trees become sparse, pale, and then explode in a plethora of colour.
Amber and saffron and gold.
The earth sighs and releases her deep essence. The aroma of life. Mud and grass and dying vegetation, rich even in their demise. Generous in their sacrifice. Nutrients seeping into the soil, waiting to sit through icy months, feeding the dormant seedlings that will once again spring to life when the earth turns her face achingly towards the sun.
I miss summer, I do. But I know that in order for us to have a summer, we must also have an autumn and a winter and a beautiful spring.
For the first time in ten years, I find myself wistful that the days are getting shorter and the nights are getting colder.
Winter beckons her long, pointed icy finger, and this time I am loathe to follow her down her icy path of starry skies and crisp, foggy moors.
I don’t know what it is. Is it the fact that social distancing has made me anxious to be indoors around other people? Is it the fact that long, bright, heady evenings are now gradually departing, leaving sudden darkness in their wake?
I don’t want to welcome winter. I want it to be summer all year around.
On Sundays, people do nothing.
Well, I don’t know what people do.
When I was a child, we lived in a hot country. And our Sundays were actually Fridays, because the first day of the week was Saturday. Weird, I know. But it didn’t feel weird when we lived there.
My mother was a powerful woman, emotionally. She is still. She could make magic out of misery, but she never hid the misery.
Some mothers cover it with a silken gauze, layers of kisses, gentle smiles and eyes full of pain, but my mother didn’t.
She sobbed in front of us, over things that were out of her control, and then visibly pulled herself together and took us to places and made us happy.
Every Friday, she organised an outdoor pool party, because there is really little you can actually do in a desert, especially back in the early 2000s, at a location somewhere on the outskirts of the city we lived in. She made it so all the families attending pitched in to pay for the daily use of a huge pool, surrounded by a garden with swings and slides and sandpits, a football pitch, and some tent-rooms for the adults to sit in and chat amongst themselves while the kids splashed in the pool under the hot sun all day. We ordered food in and dessert was a potluck of many sugary delights.
And because it was a hot country, we would go every week for most of the year, except a couple of months when it was ‘winter’ – except ‘winter’ was just mildly chilly at best.
We had something to look forward to, every weekend. And weekly school was thoroughly enjoyable too.
We had dreary weekends, of course, but nothing like I’ve experienced since coming back to live here. There is something to be said for the serotonin of sunshine, and the vitamin D of happiness!
In the UK, I don’t like Sundays.
Houses are smaller here.
Children are more cooped up, because they don’t play on the streets like they used to do in the olden days.
And there is little to do. Or too cold to do it. And people are not as social as they perhaps once had been.
Also, it’s true what they say about the UK.
It is perpetually grey.
It’s a country blanketed in dismal cloud and chill and dampness spreading its tentacles through the earth.
So it’s no wonder people want to stay in bed all day, and watch TV, and eat comforting foods like crackers and cheese and relish and cups of tea.
Smell the fresh air. It is good for you.
English winter is beautiful, don’t get me wrong. The days are so short, though, and lots of areas are so rough, but the countryside always maintains its wondrous glory, even with bare trees, it has an ethereal allure to it. Don’t you agree?
Dear Season,
I am sitting in a heated house while I write this. I am very much aware that many people don’t have heated houses, and the cold is so biting, that I feel guilty and undeserving of such a blessing.
It crept up on us, you see. We weren’t quite expecting it. Do believe me when I assure you that I am not attacking you in any way, whatsoever. You started off quite warm. I didn’t wear a jacket for two weeks straight, and oh, last weekend you were so deliciously warm. You daintily shed off your summer garments, when they browned and frayed on the edges. Softly dropping them to the ground as you gracefully welcomed the inevitable change in your very soul.
But today you are cold. You breathe an icy breath on my toes, you whip through lush grass, and suddenly the blades look ominous and cutting. Where did your cold come from? Am I being too ungrateful in questioning it? Is it uncouth of me to expect warmth in the season of blustery winds and rainy days? You welcomed the storm, O’ season. You opened your warm arms, welcomed the ravaging winds, and now the air outside is biting and snappy, and sends us hurrying from one indoor place to another. Does it bother you that we no longer wish to revel under your skies? Or are you glad, Season.
I send you a shrug, O’ season. I see how people are bundling up against you, I see the shelves are groaning under the weight of all the goodies we are expected to hand out to children, I see the glamorous lights twinkling in the early evenings, and I send you a shrug.
Make of that what you will.
Good day to you.
Regards,
Lenora
Image Credit: Hazel Thomson Art
Iron Girl by Dani Jennings
We woke up this morning to malignant ice covering every surface. It appeared to have sprouted it’s frosty tendrils overnight, like some sort of arctic fungus, through roads, pavements, cars and roofs. The whole world was blanketed with a frosty white. The air was sharp with cold. The biting kind, that creeps up on you when you least expect it, and causes your fingers to go numb.
The ache in my muscles is raw.
Today is a rest day.
I have been going to the gym every day this past week. My clothes are saturated in sweat by the end of it. I feel pumped and happy, even though the pain is near unbearable.
I got up and pottered about, getting ready to leave the house. As I pulled off my pyjamas, and stood in front of the mirror under the harsh white light of the bedroom, I noticed how wobbly my legs were. They weren’t exactly shapeless, but in the mirror I could see that the skin was not smooth and tight over my muscles. There was fat in places there hadn’t been before, and the shape wasn’t as streamlined as I like to imagine. In fact, I realised that although I had already put in so much work, there was still a very very long way to go.
They feel amazing though. My legs. All my muscles ache and ache, I can feel them slowly tightening. So at the moment I don’t care the they don’t look that great. I am getting there, slowly but surely. I can feel it, that’s all that matters right now.
Tomorrow is Abs and Arms day!
My mother in law very kindly made me a sandwich and gave me a snickers bar to take with me, the latter of which I slipped into my husband’s drawer when she left. Clean eating, I thought to myself, is the only way to see satisfying results, rather than only feel them.
Ocean Bream 