`He Was Little or Nothing But Life'

But for a brief burst of sunlight in the afternoon, Sunday was what Thoreau called “a dark-aired winter day,” even in Houston. The high was 53 degrees, the low 34 – a range dismissed as balmy at hardier latitudes. People here have been wrapped in mittens, boots and scarves since October, while I drive coatless with the windows down. The air is cool and the stink of pollution less pronounced. I tormented myself reading what Thoreau had written in his journal on Dec. 20, 1854:

“It has been a glorious winter day, its elements so simple, -- the sharp clear air, the white snow everywhere covering the earth, and the polished ice. Cold as it is, the sun seems warmer on my back even than in summer, as if its rays met with less obstruction. And then the air is so beautifully still; there is not an insect in the air, and hardly a leaf to rustle.”

How I love the quiet, clarity and long blue shadows of a winter’s day in the North. Nostrils tingle and eyes water, as though every sense has to work harder in the cold sunlight. Late Sunday afternoon, returning from my 7-year-old’s Cub Scout meeting, where we baked gingerbread men in an overheated church kitchen, I noticed a moth clinging to the back door of our house, sheltered from the wind. It was brown-gray, the color of squirrel fur, and big as a thumbnail. I touched the back and it flexed in slow motion, as though shuddering. I remembered the word “torpid” and a walk I took once in a woods in upstate New York, probably in February, a very different season from December. The snow glistened but stayed crunchy in the afternoon sunlight. The only animals I had seen were “LBJ’s” – a birder’s term for undifferentiated “little brown jobbers.”

I stopped by the tall stump of an elm. Most of its bark had fallen off. I peeled back the remaining piece and uncovered a large gray moth, four or five times the size of his Houston cousin. He, too, trembled, exposed to the sunlight and frigid air. He fanned his outer wings and exposed the gaudy pink beneath. It was like prying open an oyster shell and not expecting the nacre’s rainbow. I knew my idle blundering had condemned it to an unseasonable death. The shortest sentence in Virginia Woolf’s essay, “The Death of the Moth,” came to mind: “He was little or nothing but life.”

I gently opened and closed our back door and told the kids to stay away as I started preparing dinner. I remembered the moth later, near sundown, and slowly opened the door. He was gone and not among the brown leaves on the doormat. Here’s what Thoreau wrote in his journal on Christmas Day, 1856:

“Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”