`The Grand Old Poem Called Winter'

“That grand old poem called Winter is round again without any connivance of mine.”

Saturday afternoon and the cookie dough was ready and rolled on the counter. We awaited the arrival of my brother-in-law and nephew to begin baking Christmas cookies. I stepped outside to stuff trash in the bin and spied a tiny object drifting across my periphery. I assumed it was a moth but only a remarkable insect could flit about in such temperatures. A snowflake! The first we’ve seen since spending four years of contrition in Houston, a year-round outdoor schvitz. Cold hands and feet have never felt so good. My kids wanted to collect snow in plastic bags and preserve it in the freezer. The invocation above is from Thoreau’s journal for Dec. 7, 1856. A few sentences later he writes:

“The winters come now as fast as snowflakes. It is wonderful that old men do not lose their reckoning. It was summer, and now again it is winter. Nature loves this rhyme so well that she never tires of repeating it. So sweet and wholesome is the winter, so simple and moderate, so satisfactory and perfect, that her children will never weary of it. What a poem! an epic in blank verse, enriched with a million tinkling rhymes. It is solid beauty. It has been subjected to the vicissitudes of millions of years of the gods, and not a single superfluous ornament remains. The severest and coldest of the immortal critics have shot their arrows at and pruned it till it cannot be amended.”

Sunday we woke to unambiguous winter. Every horizontal surface not made of concrete was fleeced with snow and ice: 29 degrees Fahrenheit. By 6:30 a.m. the kids were running around the front yard in pajamas and boots, reveling in snow worship. I heard a muted clacking sound in the back yard – frozen magnolia leaves moving in the wind. Juncos and crows poked at the brown grass like shoppers at a flea market. I tried raking the last of the leaves in the backyard but they peeled off the ground in frozen sheets. Our Neolithic forebears might have built shelters with them, or wore them as vests. Thoreau saw something else in them – beauty and life. One day earlier, on Dec. 6, he wrote:

“How every one of these leaves that are blown about the snow-crust or lie neglected beneath, soon to turn to mould! Not merely a matted mass of fibres like a sheet of paper, but a perfect organism and system in itself, so that no mortal has ever yet discerned or explored its beauty.”