Before we moved to this house, I considered winter the absence of summer and summer the vessel of my happiness. That was before I began to live for sightings of the fox and the rabbit and was able to read their stories in their tracks in the snow. That was before the snow, no longer falling, no longer noisy with the wind that brought it, quieted everything enough to hear the dark-eyed junko far away down the easement, the red-bellied woodpecker’s prodigious rhythms, and the difference between the twitters of the chipmunks and the squirrels. That was before I greedily enjoyed the loss of camouflage for the hunting hawks and the nests revealed everywhere. That was before I knew the dry thistle, the perfect brown carrot flower, and the goldenrod, snowy with its own fuzz, that looks to open to more fuzz, and so on, an infinite reflection of fuzz begetting fuzz.
I have long searched for secular uniting threads that allow me to embrace some of the coziest traditions of December’s religious holidays, just for myself and my family, without needing miracles that we don’t think hold a candle to the biological one of our existence. You’ll wonder that it was only this year that I had the Epiphany of the Obvious, that December is the darkest month for my people, and that my Northeastern head and heart need to celebrate and applaud all the understudies of the sun. If you could see the way Orion is framed by our front windows in December!
January should be dreary after these parties of oil, electricity, and gas, especially since it’s when their bills are due, but instead, if there is nothing to distract you, you notice, with heartwarming optimism, the sun, as if after a good sleep, stays longer, every day, in milestone amounts. It is not too early to plan gardens and buy seeds and notice red buds on the maples and conclude that you have misunderstood dormancy. When I stood still long enough, when I stopped talking long enough, this plot of land asked me to listen to it with promises only of some stillness of air after the snow settles, within which I can see and hear the constant churning of the earth and growing and changing and newness that it secrets like a dollhouse of impossible miniatures so as not to disturb summer’s reputation.