Category: Winter Ballads

The photo of the shoreline served as a kind of quiz,
its stark simplicity and vivid near-monochrome color
evoking a question from somewhere in my mind.
Four weeks have passed since we began.
Remember? This is your gift of lessons
in winter’s palette and forms. Pause now;
look back. See what you have discovered.

I’ve seen how winter’s gallery holds wondrous abstractions,
their lines and hues compelling a more studied view.
They call out, I see, our projections, our make-believe stories
of what we could be seeing. The brain is hungry
to identify this unknown thing, to name it as if
that would produce a more intimate connection somehow,

I’ve seen that wonders hide in the details, surprises and gifts.
I’ve noticed the sharpness of things, the crystal frost, the brittle ice
along the shore that layers and grows smooth in the lake’s center
and strong enough to hold a large flock of geese
settled there as the ice were grass. I’ve learned how to see
the way that broader horizons give you a context for things,

How you frame things matters. You capture one measure
of the song’s endless score to hold it still within time, gazing
at its intricate structures, the way it rises from and gives rise
to what came before, what’s coming next. You let it tell you
its histories and the meaning of its part in the song,

I’ve observed the juxtaposition of winter’s colors, and always,
of course, the play of the light, highlighting this, casting that
into shadow in a wild and graceful dance. But this seeing
is nothing I intentionally do, beyond allowing it to happen,
inviting it to show me what it will. I go into it with a motto:
Empty mind. Open arms. Much joy.

Look! It snowed! And there’s sky!
My mind wakes in glee as I peer
through the clear spaces on the north window,
the colors revealing the mood of the day.
Then I see the window itself, pebbled
with frozen rain that must have followed the snow.
Over the years, I have witnessed frost art galore,
great, ephemeral masterpieces, on this glass.
But never before, not once, has a scene
such as this sung its welcome to the morning.
I nod and raise my mug of coffee in salute:
Good Day.

I reminded myself that I had survived the cold
when I went out to feed the chickadees. Besides,
this was the first snow of the winter, slight as it was,
to hang around for a while, and the sky had patches
of blue and all that rare, brilliant sunshine.
I relented. And the next thing I knew, there I was,
in the pines beside the lake, just passing the nursery
and noticing how the sunlight danced on the young ones’
glossy needles. But it was the dazzling light itself
that drew me. “Come,” it invited. “Look from here.”
I followed the tall shadows it cast on the ground,
the snowy spaces between them dazzling in the light,
and every inch of the place clear as the crisp air,
and singing “Hallelujah!”

Fairies dance here. I hear their silver laughter
pealing in the morning as they raise these leaves—
much the way you’d raise an umbrella—
toward the morning light. Sometimes,
from the corner of my eye, I think I see them
sitting cross-legged beneath the leaves
or leaning on the stems, peering up at the green,
their iridescent wings fluttering gently at their sides.
But when I stare at them directly, they instantly disappear.
I laugh at their shyness, and their own silver laughter
joins with mine, and the leaves do a little dance to the sound.
It makes the morning, I tell you, this laughing with fairies and leaves.

“Measure your life,” the wise man said,
not by the number of breaths you breathe,
but by the number of moments
that take your breath away.”
This one, for instance, where I sit
in my warm loft remembering
how the air smelled, how the colors
were so intense they seemed unreal,
how the huge oncoming storm
spread its powerful front across
the whole horizon. This moment,
where I am sheltered and warm
and treasuring the memory of that
January day when the scene, indeed,
took my breath away.

I step out of my dream—
the one where I’m planning supper,
reminding myself to buy gas,
thinking about the job I need to finish—
and wake to flowers. Flowers! Imagine!
Muted afternoon light pours in the window
casting soft shadows on their petals.
And outside, pearly raindrops glisten
on the tips of the spruce’s green needles.
They could have slipped right past me,
the raindrops, the flowers. The rain,
after all, had been falling for hours.
The flowers had been on my table for days.
And so they slid into the background,
unnoticed wallpaper, dim behind my dream.
But now, as if some silver bell just rang,
I am awake and seeing them, as if
for the very first time. Such joy!

The sun, at the year’s beginning, always sets
behind a stand of trees across the lake
on a little peninsula all its own. I discovered
this serendipitously on New Year’s Eve
four years ago. Each year since I’ve come here
to stand in this exact spot. It’s a tradition now,
one filled with awe and wonder. And today
I stood here again, before the tall gold grasses,
before the skim-ice on the lake whose open waters
mirrored the trees and the sky, and I watched
the clouds part just enough, for one brief moment,
to let the light of the sun shine through.

Not all days are made for playing outside.
Some days, if you have any sense at all,
are better spent examining the stitching
on the quilt, trying to decide whether the pink
flowers or the blue ones are your favorites.
If worse comes to worse you could play
Tease the Dog. But for my part, the quilt
is the thing. Hide there. Grab a nap.
Dream of sunshine. That’s the way, I say,
to spend a winter day.

Take a good look, I whisper, passing the old barn.
This sight is one to save; it’s one of the last
of its kind, nearly a relic. But its roots
are deep and still it holds on, alive
and productive, regardless of the times.
It holds the stories of generations,
their sweat and celebrations, setbacks
and victories, ways of life hardly known
to us now, but floating on time’s river
nevertheless, into a foreign world.
It holds the songs of children playing
in the gardens, the low moos of cows
echoing from the barn, the growling
of old tractors working the rocky fields.
It stands for endurance, for relying
on nothing but faith and hard work
to carry you through the next season,
the next day. It sings the defiance
of survivors, and their strength
and satisfaction. It’s down-to-earth
come to life, and its roots are deep.

The sun would be out in the morning, they said,
but clouds would return later. I headed out.
I had errands to run, but first I would indulge
in a drive down country roads to see the woods
and the farmlands and barns in this January
sun’s rare light. I’d take a Sunday drive.

Six miles down the road, a turn to the west
revealed the immense cloud bank rising
from the southwest. I turned south to meet
the highway again and make my stops.

The cloud bank flew above me
to my destination and when I parked
I was beneath its head, broad and wide,
its wake of plump white rows quilting the sky,
as pale ribbons of lavender gray lay strewn

in spaced arches across them. It raced
over the sky, its stretched arms reaching
both the north and south horizons.

In a trance of amazement, I walked
toward the store, looking at my fellow shoppers
to see if they, too, were as stunned by the sight as I.
But their faces were blank and grim against the cold,
and not one of them saw that they walked beneath
a great wonder.