If you are afflicted with melancholy at this season, go to the swamp and see the brave spears of skunk cabbage buds already advanced toward a new year…. See those green cabbage buds lifting the dry leaves in that watery and muddy place…. They see over the brown of winter’s hill. They see another summer ahead.
Henry David Thoreau
In spite of a spiritual imperative, articulated in the call of the geese and the robins, to abandon the cold, I am spending winter in the North again. I have done my raking for the year. The strawberries are covered with straw. The pumpkins are aging, and the apple cider is made. The garden is filled with manure. Sweet Williams, spinach and onions are planted and covered for April.
With summer scattered and withered, I count each of my allies, from my wife and daughters to the birds at the sunflowers. The tropical plants I have inside the greenhouse are budding, needing care and reminding me of choices I have made. It is too late to run, to merge into the flyway corridor away from January. I am committed to solstice and to the next quarter into equinox.
After the nostalgia that accompanies migration and the sadness of leaf fall, my brain receives new signals, defiance and a call to survive. I am already counting days, attempting to demystify the time ahead. Thirty-five days to solstice, 65 to the center of winter, 100 to the first hours of early spring. A finite, divided winter is already mastered. Soon it will seem too short, I tell myself, the hibernation not long enough.
Garlic mustard is already waiting all across the woodland floor. It sprouted fourteen months ago and has persevered with only a cluster of basal leaves all summer. The worst freeze will not kill it. It is ready for the end of April. There is a faith in its roots, a knowledge I can use against my suspicion that the end of the year mirrors too closely the end of human existence. Far wiser things than I have absolute faith. They give promises the sun has and will come back again.
Storms and the snows arrive to test the woodpile and my fantasy of self-sufficiency. The corner is turned. The grieving for summer and fall are over quickly. In a few weeks, it is no surprise to see bare branches. I look for what is there instead of what is gone.
Christmas cacti blossom.. Aloe spikes rise to bloom in the late November greenhouse. Paperwhites send up their foliage. My violet hibiscus blossoms, remembering some tropical dictate, faithful here, finding just the right amount of light to make its seeds. In the sun, the starlings, staying here within reach of my safe feeder, swing in the back trees. Window parsley is growing new leaves.
I go out collecting second-spring foliage from sweet Cicely, chickweed, sweet rockets, waterleaf, cinquefoil, violet cress, hemlock, parsnip, avens and next September’s zigzag goldenrod.There are days when it could be March, hazy skies, cardinals singing, temperatures in the warm fifties. I walk the swamp and find Thoreau’s “brave spears of the skunk cabbage, buds already advanced toward a new year.
“They see over the brown of winter’s hill,” Henry David promises my doubts. “They see another summer ahead.”