Let Us Sing Winter

“I knew a crazy man who walked into an empty pulpit one Sunday and, taking up the hymn book, remarked: ‘We have had a good fall for getting in corn and potatoes. Let us sing Winter.’ So I say, ‘Let us sing Winter.’ What else can we sing and our voice be in harmony with the season?” Henry Thoreau, Journal, 1/30/54

Sometimes, I feel like that crazy man.

The buzz (a sort of song) begins days in advance. For me, the mix of modern forecasting tools and work at a school ensures rumor’s percolation well before any storm coalesces off the mid-Atlantic, where our biggest, our “historic” snows all come from. Prediction of snow makes us all ten again.

None more so than my friend, Don. Yes, Don has professional reason for his weather-eye (he is in charge of our school’s plant and emergency preparations), but his weather-heart is that of a kid. Last fall, when my eponymous hurricane was making its approach to catastrophe along the mid-Atlantic, I received a series of e-mails tracking and speculating…about me. To defend myself, I had to resort to verse:

963 (my central pressure)

…I got it all goin’, me wind is up,
I got de spin, me cheeks is bowin’.
What you gonna do when de wind start blowin’…

o, donnie donnie k, gon blow you plans all away.

…forecasters now got me goin’ to new jersey,
but I ain’t goin’ dere, dem guys is crazy;
I comin’ to see you in you Concord place,
we gonna play wit de roofs and play wit you face.

S-caine

This week my inbox began the beep and chatter again. “This could be epic,” began one e-note, anticipating a Boston.com headline by days. Power-point summaries and a thick accumulation of links followed – not that I needed much prodding to begin my own cyber-sleuthing of the oncoming storm’s formation. Long before the word “blizzard” was broken out by weather’s officialdom, I’d begun to envision horizontal snow and car-shrouding drifts.

“Let us sing Winter,” I wrote back, hoping to annoy Don by quoting Thoreau, and I began my wait for winter to sing back. But, like any true ten-year-old, I was antsy with anticipation, and so, tiring of hectoring Don with minute-by-minute e-mails, I took myself out for a walk along the river. It was cold, but only the faintest flow of air reinforced that cold when I turned north. Skim ice had edged back out toward the river’s current after the recent thaw, and the water was winter-black, its swirls had the thickness of oil. Only the riverside ice and frozen pools in shallow depressions retained a scrim of snow; they shone white in the leaf-brown landscape. Saplings had on their clerical collars of ice, and in one waterside thicket, a flash of red said, “cardinal.” As close to religious sanction as I get, I walked on, the only sound the scuffing of winter-tired leaves underfoot.

As often happens during such walks, my inner-child gave way to a more contemplative self, and I was mulling over this easy, open winter and its variations, even as tomorrow it would put on its usual white coat. Near walk’s end, along the old railroad grade that approaches the vanished bridge over the Sudbury, a flood of sunlight slipped through a slat in the clouds, and, almost immediately, the little sunbank was alive with birds. “Juncos,” I thought. But then a chip of color flew by and lit on a nearby branch; I looked more closely: skyblue back, ruffous breast. Bluebirds. Heart of summer sky. Beyond their winter range, but assuredly here.

These blue reminders piled up against the predicted storm, a mash-up of seasons. I sat down in those few minutes of sun and listened to the bluebirds overturning leaves, scuffling I guessed for cold-slow insects and wondered about the way our days contain so many weathers. And I walked back wondering also where these bluebirds would be tomorrow, when, if Don and his prophet NOAA are right, the snow will be above my knees.

Perhaps I am a crazy man. Surely I have trouble sorting the silly from the serious, just as our seasons seem uncertain of themselves too.

Still, “Let us sing Winter.”

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