Winter-strained

“But the winter was not given to us for no purpose. We must thaw its cold with our genialness. We are tasked to find out and appropriate all the nutriment it yields. It is a cold, hard season, its fruit, no doubt is the more concentrated and nutty…The winter was made to concentrate and harden and mature the kernel of his [man’s] brain, to give tone and firmness and consistency to his thought. Then is the great harvest of the year, the harvest of thought…Now we burn with a purer flame like the stars; our oil is winter-strained.”  Henry Thoreau, Journal, 1/30/54

Late last evening, as the core of our big snow arrived, I sat by the window and watched the stream of white flow horizontally through an illuminated cone cast by a klieg light. It was mesmerizing. When the wind blew hard and steady from the northeast, the flakes became a river, boiling by, seeming even to curl over and around unseen stones in the air; but then, when the wind paused, spun sometimes on its heels, the snow whirled too, scattering like embers shot from a popping fire, or those running from some place of riot.

Minutes into this reverie, I saw a dark body shoot through the lit patch…and then another. Two birds, though what sort I couldn’t tell. And wasn’t it rather late, I wondered; shouldn’t they be puffed up and perched in some dense conifer, sheltering from this storm?

In the morning’s still-dense snow, I saw tentative answer. A flock of over-wintering robins was in a rank of wild cherry trees, whose concentrated berries clung still to the branches. The robins ate facing into the gale, sometimes floating back off their branches during gusts, seemingly at home in the wild air. And then, one, two, three streaked by that same window to a thick tangle of trees knit together by the invasive bittersweet. Perhaps bittersweet is an approved second course after cherries.

Robin and Wild Cherries

But the cherries, which often draw cedar waxwings in the fall, have been there untouched all through this open winter. Were they being banked for such a season-closing storm? Perhaps.

Later, I would go out for the ritual uncovering of path and cars, for the close sound of the snow-stirring wind and the tick and rattle of ice crystals on my parka. But for some minutes, I watched the birds moving between these two berries and thought back to the night’s pouring river of snow. I hadn’t harvested any great thoughts, but the way the roaring river of wind had carried the snow seemed akin to “a purer flame like the stars.” My mind seemed to draw upon an oil that felt “winter-strained,” and both these robins and I seemed intent on finding the nutty fruit of a “cold, hard season.”

And you, what appeared to you through the curtains of our big snow?