Slouching towards 2011

For the past two weeks, my daughter has been working on a sculpture inspired by Winter.
She started with dead tree branches, and a sketchbook full of assocations, and ended up with something rather spidery and menacing.  Here, it looks rather like a large and upright praying mantis.

I'm not phobic about creepy, crawly things, but I do have an uncomfortable relationship with January.
This year it seems to be particularly bad, although -- as one of my friends tactfully told me -- "you are never very good in January.

We had an excessively sociable December, and maybe part of what I'm experiencing is a natural burn-out.
Winter is the time for renewal, as we all know, but I do hate the diminishment of my natural energies and enthusiasm.  I've had no energy for resolutions this year; and no desire for anything other than sleeping, reading and -- while the fleeting pleasure lasted -- watching episodes of Downton Abbey.  It's not that I'm lying prone on the sofa, and in fact I've had some hurry-scurry days, but still I feel like I'm just going through the motions . . . waiting, somehow, for things to begin.

It doesn't help that dusk seems to come at 3 pm, and the sky is a mass of smothering weeping cloud.  I do love England, my adopted country, but my native Texan self does suffer at this time of year.

Still, getting to the point of being able to write about it, is probably a sign that I'm beginning to emerge from the worst of my annual winter funk.  Here is a poem, which I dedicate to my fellow SAD sufferers, by the wonderful Linda Pastan.

SAD

Is is seasonal affective disorder

I suffer from?  This special lamp

I bought doesn't help at all,

but I do light up whenever

the sun itself appears.  you say

the blossoms are most themselves

on a cloudy day, as if contrast

is what flowers are about.

But I feel as swollen with useless tears

as the clouds must be with rain,

projecting their shadows

over fields that are simply waiting

to blaze back to green.

The world is always going to pieces,

and we're all growing rapidly

towards our deaths, even the children.

But just one hit of sun,

one almost lethal shot

of pure, yellow light

(like the hand of some saint

I don't even believe in

touching my face)

and I'll forget the whole broken world,

forget the impermanence of beauty.

I'll simply catch on fire from

a single spoke of sun.

With a single exception, everyone in my family has a January birthday.  When I am in a wintery mood, (see the beginning of the second stanza), that seems like an exceptionally grim thing.  Please forgive me; I'm having a morbid moment.  The forecast is nothing but rain, rain, rain, but hopefully I will be myself again soon.

January:  I can't wait to see the back of you.

frozen

We live on the edge of a forest, and in the winter we sometimes get what I think of as frozen fog.

A thick mist seems to rise from the ground, and if it's cold enough, it encases every leaf and blade of grass and hedgerow twig in silvery ice.  The effect is magical.

This year, the big freeze came before the oak trees had shed their leaves and we've had a rare display of bronze mixed in with the more usual shades of pewter-gray. 

Last week I had spent the morning shopping for a party . . . (I utter the word "Costco" only so you may appreciate the contrast) . . . and on the drive back home I was arrested by the sight of these ghostly trees.  Although it was only mid-afternoon, the dusk was purplish-dark already.   It was as if Winter had cast a spell of enchantment and all of the world was frozen in its tracks. 

I'm not immune to winter's charms, but sometimes I have to be reminded that chief amongst them is that deep blanketing silence that is not experienced at any other time of the year.

I've had two solid weeks of almost unceasing activity, and way too many evenings which have ended in morning -- surely not a good thing at the darkest time of the year -- but funnily enough, I think that it is these few quiet moments that will stay with me:

my daughter's purely sung solo (in candlelit darkness) at the Christmas concert tonight,

and the world stilled and silenced by frozen fog.

Snowdrops

It seems that nearly everyone in the Northern Hemisphere

has had too much snow this winter

(except, perhaps, Vancouver).

In England,

February is a tug-of-war

between winter and spring.

All week long, we've had shafts of sunlight

playing peek-a-boo

with volleys of hail,

and flurries of snow,

and sheets of sleet.

Never mind the frigid temperatures,

spring will eventually get the upper hand.

Snow-like they may be,

but these galanthus

are the first bulbs out of the starting gate.

Autumn leaves,

it's your turn to sink into the earth.

So soon now, the gray of winter

will be replaced by spring green.

February is a pointillist painter,

adding a swathe of yellow aconites

to winter's monochrome palette.

Not the showiest flower,

it's true,

but so refreshing.

I'll race you to half-term

Barely have we recovered from the long Christmas holiday and snow days

 but it is half-term, already.

Time for the cross-country race.

It's a tradition; and the accretion of years is such

 that even the Headmaster can't recall

why February

 is the traditional season

to don your shorts

and race around the frozen fields.

Double-click on the pictures

better to see the tiny racing figures

and the flock of sheep.

Do you suppose those sheep

look up from their munching

and wonder, idly,

what the fuss is about?

 Might they get the notion

to join in?

And now, we run around the lake

girls in green,

and boys in red.

Unlike the runners,

the bystanders are all bundled up.

Wellies, tweed, a hat and most of all

a dog

are de rigieur.

The perfect examplar

of English country style.

The last bit is all up-hill

and it separates

the sprinters from the stragglers.

You do get a boost from the crowd, though.

It's all over now . . .

except for the jelly doughnut, the hot chocolate

the warm bath

and two loads of sports kit in the wash.

Good night January

Goodnight January

goodnight to the old decade
goodnight resolutions made

goodnight gloomy winter skies
goodnight soup and shortcrust pies

goodnight after-Christmas bills
goodnight slipping down the hill

goodnight forecasts always bleak
goodnight birthdays every week

goodnight school-runs in the dark
goodnight snowmen in the park

goodnight frozen garden hose
goodnight flu and stuffed-up nose

goodnight black and shades of gray
good morning to the longer days!

Contextualizing

three different views

of the same fields,
the same horses,

in one week

Context is everything; context is all.

Is it the weather, the landscape, or both?  It's both, of course.

Today was my first "normal" day since December 13th.  But how do I define normal?

Normal is taking the kids to school, no snow on the roads, the morning at Jane Austen House, the afternoon at home tutoring, several loads of wash to do, gnocchi with tomato sauce for dinner, lots of emails to catch up with, a new book to begin, a blog to write.

The Christmas holidays, followed by the snow holidays, were threatening to permanently pre-empt my notions of normal life.  Can you still call it "normal" if it stops being your default context?  A week of Christmas snow is magical; a week of playing-hooky-from-real-life snow is fun; after that, it stops being a novelty and starts being tiresome.

My youngest daughter had precisely one day in school before I whisked her off to Copenhagen for a birthday (her 12th) Blog Camp.  For three days, 10 of us talked (and talked), and drank tea, and sewed, and art-journaled.  It was too intense to be normal.  Even though the sky was gray and the wind was bitter, there was a warm golden glow that can't be entirely explained by those Scandinavian wood-burning fires.

For the first time in years, I have a circle of friends who are younger than I am.  Isn't age one of the strangest, most bizarrely contextual states of mind and being?  During the Christmas holidays, I watched an Elvis retrospective and re-discovered that he was only 42 when he died.   How did  42 get to be such a shockingly young age to die?  When I was a child he seemed plenty old -- and so washed-up.  Although I'm fairly relaxed about being 43 (and one week old), I still can't help but think:  I am now older than Elvis.

We are expecting heavy snow tonight.  My oldest daughter has her Physics GCSE tomorrow.  If necessary, we will put on our ski clothes and walk miles through the snow to school.  It's getting to be our new normal.

Some wintery whimsy

The world is white

The day had a dream-like quality to it.

A week of snow has interrupted all of our usual rhythms and routines, and food and play have been uppermost in our minds. I keep trudging down to the little shop to buy more milk, because hot chocolate and rice pudding require so much of what is usually just dribbled out for cups of tea. (Building igloos and snowmen is hungry work.) Tonight we will have an apple and walnut crumble, and thus we must have custard. This afternoon, the shop was packed with people who would usually be at work or school. Hats obscured faces and heavy jackets steamed as the snow melted in the sudden warmth. Everyone bundled up -- all of us preparing for a siege, apparently. It doesn't take much to bring out the hoarding instinct.

Sigmund says that in Surrey, only an hour's drive away, the snow has turned to rain. It is hard to believe that; hard to believe that it is actually warm in other places. The snow has obscured every other reality.

I have been lost in a fictional world, too. Last night I began Elizabeth's A Fortunate Child, and utterly absorbed, I read late into the night. Much of the story takes place in World War II, and it follows two women -- one English and one German, one waiting for the war to end and one displaced by it. Most of the story is told in first-person, and the voices seem so authentic and true -- they get right into your head. Sigmund was up in London for the evening, and I felt obliged to stay conscious in order to will him home safely. He did eventually arrive, but by that time it was 2 am and I had drifted off . . . dreaming of Gisella's hard scramble to stay alive in the harsh German winter of 1945. I had just fallen into a deep sleep when he woke me up again, talking of strange things: visiting Churchill's Cabinet War Rooms, down in the basement of the Foreign Office. It was rather surreal, actually. Did I dream this conversation, or did my involvement with a story swamp the present-tense of my life?

The mundane world and a more fantastic version - at times, the line between them is so wispy-thin.

Beyond the left border of our house, and just up the hill a bit, is a small farm. From our garden, we can just make out the large Georgian brick house, with its two substantial chimneys, and the collection of barns and outbuildings. I have been to this farm, and like most others it is slightly shabby, with hay on the ground and odd abandoned tools of the trade and the pervasive smell of animals. Yet from a distance, and shrouded in snow, it looks like a fairy-tale farm . . . from a child's picture book or an oil painting. I know it is fanciful of me, but in the glow of winter's pale setting sun, it seems less real to me than the book that I have just devoured.

Winter's Walk

Ralph (incarcerated)

I fed the prisoner some oatmeal

to warm his tummy on such a cold day.

Greedy thing! He ate it so quickly that he got

an oatmeal mustache. But when I returned with

the camera, he had rinsed it away.

He fixes me with an accusing eye.

When I can't get outside for my daily walk, I start to feel like a caged thing.

I walk, almost every day, for exercise and mental health - I'm not sure which comes first, or even if I could differentiate between them. I will walk in most weather conditions: hot, warm, cold, spitting, raining, snowing, or blowing. I draw the line only at pelting it down and that horrendous combination of wet and wind which is, for me, most insalubrious.

I know that only a Texan (or similar) would find England cold. Compared to what the Canadians and Finns (for example) have to put up with, England's winter is practically balmy. However, I think that most people would agree that England does specialize in a form of bone-chilling damp that has evolved a hot tea/hot fire/hot AGA loving people.

It might seem contradictory, but I think that proper cold is preferable to all the wettish, grayish mucky muck. After a few teasing little snow flurries and sub-degree temperatures, we awoke to a beautifully frozen world on Saturday morning. Suddenly, all of those sad shrubs and sodden grasses acquired an elegant frosting. After bundling up to feed the chickens, I felt inclined to wander out and inspect the changes that the frost wrought.

The field to the right of our back garden.

It looks so pastoral, but I have left out the view of my neighbor's junk car collection. (We live nearby the English version of Sanford & Son.) But don't those weeds look lovely?

Hillview Farm, next door on the left-hand side

Usually, it is a world of mud.

On a clear day, you can see the hill

of Watership Down on the horizon.

Our road cuts through old farming ground.

The road is dense with houses on both sides, but tiny parcels of farmland lie behind. It feels rural and strangely suburban at the same time.

I climbed up onto a high bank to take this picture.

Again, the solitary splendor of the view misrepresents the reality: a busy thoroughfare full of speeding cars, cyclists, walkers, horses and the occasional inconvenient lorry. The one-lane road must make room for many.

This rather steep hill is so densely thicketed that it stays dark on even the sunniest of days. Although it is only a mile from the bus-stop at the top of the hill to our Barn at the bottom of the hill, my daughter has successfully argued that it is a hazardous journey.

She requires car service; unlike her mother, she doesn't enjoy a nice walk.

English winter, even when frosted, is monochrome.