Week 7Winter Week 7
If I cultivate a flourishing, I want its reach to be wide.
—Camille T. Dungy, Soil
For most of my adult life, I wore a red coat when the weather got cold. It started when I was twenty-two and searching for new outerwear during what turned out to be my one winter in Philadelphia. I kept being drawn to a bright red peacoat in a mail-order catalog. Perhaps it reminded me of home in Alabama, the color of the ubiquitous cardinals perched among green pine needles, the color of camellia blossoms tucked among glossy leaves on branches that reached higher than our neighbors’ windows.
My block in urban Philadelphia offered no such reminders of home. The birds outside my grad-school apartment were pigeons and house sparrows and starlings, gray or brown or black. Where were the blue jays singing their squeaky screen-door song, or the flickers with their merry red mustaches, or the red-breasted robins scratching for worms in the brown grass? Philadelphia lies within the year-round range of all three species, I knew, but no such birds ever found their way anywhere near my fourth-floor walkup on the four-lane surface road. I might as well have been looking for camellias.
From the moment it arrived, I adored that red peacoat. The Philly skies were steely and low, continually threatening snow or a bitter rain, and I felt happier swaddled in a cheerful bit of living color while the world turned itself into a nineteenth-century engraving all around me.
Even before I left Alabama, winter was my least-favorite season, a time when songbirds mostly cease their singing and small, furtive creatures find a secret place to sleep all day. Winter is the season of coats, the season of shoes. In summer I was a barefoot child in the emerald woods. In winter I sat indoors and watched it rain.
My mother’s flower beds were always beautifully extravagant, even at ground-floor apartments we rented for no more than a year, and Mom coped with the wintertime blues by poring over gardening books and catalogs. I stuck with my red-coat cure. Then the zipper broke on my last red coat, and I couldn’t find a replacement I liked. Turns out it didn’t matter. Somewhere along the way I had stopped hating winter. I fell in love with the way the peeling bark and bare limbs of the sycamore reveal a ghost tree reaching for the sky, and the way the faded beech leaves cling to their branches and rustle in the wind like dry bells. A beech tree in a winter forest gives off its own light in the same way that dogwood blossoms in springtime look like tiny ground-borne suns.
I love the great horned owl’s haunting courtship song and the crows’ constant, multilayered conversation. There are good reasons not to make a habit of feeding wildlife—creatures who lose their fear of humans too often come to a bad end at the hands of fearful humans—but I do leave peanuts out for my wild neighbors before winter storms, when their survival may depend upon my help. I delight in watching the squirrels hiding their prizes under the leaf litter, and then watching the wily blue jays dig them up and carry them away to their own hidey-holes. I have come to welcome the gray, lowering skies because they mean I will have the trails at the park to myself.
Who could fail to embrace a season so beautiful and so fragile?
Even the most ideologically stubborn among us have finally come to understand how fragile winter truly is. It is only the first week of February, but the daffodils have already begun to bloom. There can be no reasonable argument about what is happening to the planet, now that daffodils so commonly bloom in February.
Nevertheless, the winter of old still returns from time to time, and the songbirds once again swarm my feeders. In the absence of insects, even the bluebirds will settle for sunflower hearts until I can get to the store for mealworms. When I leave for a walk on a night with temperatures in the teens, my eyes tear up, and the tears freeze to the inside of my glasses. The dog refuses to leave the driveway, plainly telling me that any creature with a warm shelter should not be walking in weather like this.
That’s when I remember the garden catalogs, the pleasure of sitting under a blanket on a cold night and thumbing through page after page of flowers. One year a storm split one of our maple trees straight through the middle, and we had no choice but to take it down to a stump. When it was gone, there was a new sunny place in our yard, room for a whole new pollinator bed to feed our bees and butterflies. I picked out some promising varieties from an heirloom seed catalog, and then I looked them all up to make sure they were native to Middle Tennessee. By the time I’d come up with a plan for the new flower bed that included plants of varying heights and colors and blooming times, plants that are also compatible with the specific light and soil conditions of our yard and the specific needs of native insects, I felt as though I’d passed some kind of test.
I was so absorbed by the task of planning for spring that I completely forgot how long the wait for true springtime would be. I was thinking about the scent of turned earth, the feel of damp soil. I was feeling grateful that nature always renews itself, given even half a chance. I was remembering my favorite part of planting: the moment when the seedling, fragile as any lace-winged insect or hollow-boned nestling, somehow shoves the clods of earth aside and makes its way upward and outward. Searching for the light.