A Small Appreciation for Winter

If you take the average latitude of all the places I've lived, weighted by time I lived there, you'd get ~42° N. Rather unsurprisingly, that's right around where I grew up, went to college, and lived for several years after school. It's also far enough north that winters are pretty bleak: raw temps dip below 0°F several times a season (sometimes for days at a time), there are just 9 hours of daylight to greet you at the winter solstice, and if you have to start a cold car before 8am you'll likely be goddamn miserable.

A natural question arises: why put myself through this? Theoretically, I'm free to move wherever I want, and there are about a million places with better weather than the Upper Midwest. But the answers are equally natural: proximity to family, familiarity, convenience. I've never been one for drastic life changes, and I know that I'd see my parents and siblings less if I were a flight away rather than a drive. So... that leaves me fabricating justifications for withstanding a cold, dark winter every year. Artificial or not, I'll take what I can get.

Today I took a short walk at 4:15pm— sun sliding low, 19°F— and I found what I'd been looking for. Maybe being penned indoors all day heightens the senses, but I encountered a lot of beauty in the 15 minutes I spent roaming the neighborhood. Ice and snow gently crunching underfoot, each step a gentle call to mindfulness. Pale sunlight casting a soft glow onto the snowy yards— indoors appearing even warmer by the comparison. And the silhouettes of the street trees' uppermost branches grazing the low sunset like hands in a running stream. It may not equal a summer evening in vibrancy or sweetness, but there's something to be said of winter's quiet grace.

When tasked with defending the Midwest winter, I've historically reached for its dependents. Fall is so beautiful and special because it's fleeting, I'd say. Spring wildflowers and summer grill-outs wouldn't carry the same weight without such a rough backdrop. I stand by this argument, but it's more evasive than confrontational. It passively admits that yes, winter sucks, but... And today, I want to appreciate winter for what it is. Freezing, dusky, isolating, but also an invitation to slow down, to bear witness. I feel spoiled in the summer when I can identify most trees by a quick glance at their leaves. January requires greater diligence. I have to scrutinize the upper trunk of a red oak, looking for the characteristic "ski track" pattern on the bark. I have to trace the gnarled, shriveled, erratic limbs of a northern catalpa before remembering that in 5 months it will be an unmistakable orchestra of white, trumpet-shaped flowers. I have to search for leaf spurs sticking out like vertebrae on a spine— or bolts in the neck of Frankenstein— and pale, braided bark to know that I stand facing a ginkgo, once the peer of megalosaurs and now doubtless unimpressed by the homo sapiens before it.

Winter is a challenge. I have no doubt that I'll curse the season as I rub my hands together waiting for my car to warm up tomorrow morning. But that only strengthens my case: that the subtle, ephemeral beauty will always present itself to those with open eyes and ears, and they'd better take care not to miss it.