The chickens are eating the cat food, the deer are eating the chicken food, and the rabbit is eating the sunflower seeds that have fallen from the bird feeder. Our backyard is a literal frozen tundra, and even the hardiest creatures are finding it difficult–if not impossible–to paw or peck through the icy crust. Winter persists.
Arctic vortex? Snow quakes? You realize that these have become household words, and then you begin remembering scenes from Stephen King’s The Shining. You recall images of Jack Nicholson’s character, a writer, who has retreated to a Colorado resort–closed for the season–for quiet time to write. You remember how, after weeks of snowy isolation, he slowly lost his mind. Sitting alone before a typewriter on a small table in a grand room, he composed page after page of All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, as sheet after repetitive sheet fell in piles at his feet. King describes Nicholson’s character as a microbe trapped in the intestine of a monster. Frigid temperatures, record snowfall, microbes trapped in the intestine of winter monsters–spring cannot come too soon!
It’s the sheer length and breadth of it, the gray skies that that doggedly spit and spew ice and snow, the way we drag it, like a shroud, through our days. Winter persists. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes:
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it all will your heart survive. [The Sonnets to Orpheus: Book 2: Xiii]
This is it exactly: a winter so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it all will your heart survive. It all began so cozily with nights before a crackling fire, and now it simply will not end. And wintering through it has much to do with tapping into the invincible summer that Albert Camus claims that he found in the depth of winter.
For me–as I suspect for many–it’s not so much the incessant cold and snow but the isolation that winter often brings. I used to walk along the old highway near my home as much for the sense of being a part of something larger than myself than for exercise. Now, I retreat to a far room in the basement, mount my elliptical machine, and move my feet for 30 minutes. Alone. With only my own thoughts to keep me company.
This solitude is not always the good, contemplative kind. It’s often the inward-turning, self-doubting type of prolonged isolation. I remember the summer during my college years when I got a job cleaning motel rooms. Initially, I recall how much I enjoyed my own quiet company. In contrast to working fast food and life-guarding–both positions in which I was never alone, crushed in activity and noise–I relished the independence of it all. Until one day, I did not. Day after day of isolation had taken its toll. I no longer wanted to be alone with my own thoughts and feelings. I tried desperately to turn them off and often resorted to turning on the television (a clear violation of work rules) to drown out the rising fear and doubt. What if I couldn’t get the last class I needed to graduate? What if I couldn’t get into grad school? What if I simply wasn’t cut out to be a teacher? Or a serious student of anything? What if–heaven forbid–I was destined to wield a mop and a spray bottle of Lime-Away for the rest of my life?
Having taken a course in pioneer literature, I was acutely aware of the devastating effects of prairie fever. Isolated and often left alone for months while their husbands or fathers looked for work or conducted business, some prairie women succumbed to debilitating depression, to delusions and even to suicide. Author Willa Cather once described the Nebraska plains as the dark country and the end of the earth. These were women who were well acquainted with the night to borrow a phrase from poet Robert Frost. They understood that winter only added insult to injury. In 1893, E. V. Smalley wrote:
When the snow covers the ground the prospect is bleak and dispiriting. No brooks babble under icy armor. There is no bird life after the wild geese and ducks have passed on their way south. The silence of death rests on the vast landscape, save when it is swept by cruel winds… [The Isolation of Life on Prairie Farms]
I have noticed, however, that collective isolation (is this a term I can use?) tends to elicit a kind of unique camaraderie. Standing in the grocery line checkout, strangers often talk to each other, joking–or lamenting–about the latest weather forecast or commenting on the large displays of ice-melt at the store’s entrance. Weather isolation breeds unlikely, albeit temporary friendships. This has made me sincerely grateful for my weekly grocery shopping trips. A loaf of bread, a gallon of milk, a new friend? Why not?
And my new mantra is one borrowed from English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley: If winter comes, can spring be far behind? Ah yes, the passing of isolation and ice and the emergence of all things green and fragrant and an outdoor world peopled with, well, people! This world is right around the proverbial corner, and most of us can see its lilac face shining in the distance.
Months from now, there may be a time when I look fondly back on this winter of the arctic vortex, record snow, and seemingly permanent ice-fields. But probably not. Like comedian Carl Reiner, I will look back on all this snow as an unnecessary freezing of water. I’ll take my frozen water in ice cubes floating joyously in freshly-squeezed lemonade, thank you very much. And I’ll forget all about these isolating winter months when I walk the violet-laden path to my grandkids’ house.
