'It Has Become a Symbol to Me'

“Winter brings natural inducements to jollity and conversation.” 

Despite social media, pandemics and political rancor, Dr. Johnson’s observation remains stubbornly true after more than two and a half centuries, especially for those of us who grew up with four demarcated seasons. A natural withdrawal takes place as days grow shorter, darker and colder. Thrown together by the elements, we have a choice: Get along or make each other miserable. None of this is fated. Unhappiness is ours to embrace. As an English professor once told us, “Propinquity breeds special relationships.” That cuts both ways. It can be a time of collegiality, warmth and delight, or inbred nastiness. Johnson continues in The Rambler on this date, December 22, in 1750: “Differences, we know, are never so effectually laid asleep, as by some common calamity. An enemy unites all to whom he threatens danger.”

 

Johnson’s “enemy” here is winter but it might also be the COVID-19 lockdown, depression or general incivility. Christmas arrives just in time to relieve some of the challenges posed by the bottom of the year. Johnson goes on:

 

“The rigour of winter brings generally to the same fire-side, those, who, by the opposition of inclinations, or difference of employment, move in various directions through the other parts of the year; and when they have met, and find it their mutual interest to remain together, they endear each other by mutual compliances, and often wish for the continuance of the social season, with all its bleakness, and all its severities.”

 

I think of the painter Charles Burchfield, a dauntingly resilient fellow who had the gift of seeing beauty everywhere. On this day in 1957 he writes in his journal:

 

“I don’t know when I first noticed the oakleaf in Cottrell’s yard—but I think it was during a snowstorm in early November—Somehow it landed in such a way that it stands upright, about midway between the spruce tree outside our window and the chestnut tree—Repeated gales and snows have failed to dislodge it, there it stands, a dark sienna imp-like thing defying the elements to move it. It has become a symbol to me—a friendly little creature that tells me to likewise stand firm and hold on, through all the moments of despair and doubt—I think of it as a little friend.”

 

In Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield (DelMonico Books-Prestel, 2009), the editors reproduce a photograph of the framed oak leaf preserved by the painter’s widow, Bertha, and hung in his studio. The leaf inspired Burchfield to paint “Constant Leaf” in 1960, and the editors include an excerpt from a letter he wrote to a friend, John Baur:

 

“I must tell you about ‘my’ oak leaf--in my neighbor’s yard. The yard had been raked clean of leaves, but later, somehow this oak leaf got attached to something in the grass, so that it stands upright, and repeated gales and snow-storms have failed to dislodge it. (I first noticed it in early November.) It bends over with the wind and when it is calm again, there it is, standing up so pert and imp-like. On gray days it is a dark sepia, on sunny days, a rich sienna. For me it has become a sort of symbol or example—as it clings so stubbornly, so must I `hang on’ through this illness which has lasted so long. I have moments of utter despair, and then I look out and see this little oak-leaf, my little friend. Each morning I look for it and it is always there.”

 

Burchfield seems not to have been a notably touchy-feely man. He loved the natural world and found solace in it, without turning into a nature mystic. His journal entry for Jan. 23, 1960, reads:

 

“P.M.—painted the `Constant (or Stedfast [sic]) Leaf’ picture—a tribute to an oak leaf that became anchored in Cottrell’s lawn in 1957, and stayed there upright through every storm—I saw in it a symbol of the need of holding fast to my faith in spite of my affliction—(In March Bertha went out and got it—The stem was imbedded in the ground over an inch—we put it in a book to preserve it).”