The old year lost its power over me at some point in the middle of January. I felt rather than saw the change take place. Using inventories of what was happening in the landscape, I tried to define just what was involved in the disappearance of late autumn. I tried to understand just how something so obvious and powerful had eluded me. Where had it gone and how did it disappear?
After leaf drop, there was a lingering sense of the canopy, remnants reminding me of what had been there. Certain shrubs and trees kept their leaves longer than others. Their foliage trickled away during December, and then I became distracted by cold or snow. I experienced disbelief at the bare branches, and then a relief that the fall was over and that the crisis had passed. I felt a hardening of the heart, a hunkering down for the weather to come.
The number of honeysuckle berries dwindled after Christmas. Then, January stripped away so much time from December’s nights, setting the birds singing and promising things they could not deliver soon enough. I instinctively looked for pieces of the new year, finally tiring of counting the old pieces. Pussy willows and the foliage of the earliest bulbs emerged ever so slightly. Little by little they all erased the loss of the previous spring, summer and fall.
Counting one thing is always about counting something else. The question of seasonal recollection asks me about something more, asks about passage and value and the shades of loss and reconciliation. In deep winter, I remember people separated from me like seasons (for whatever reason, because of transgression or death or distance), and I wonder about the perennial return of their images and the power of their continued presence.
Today is the gateway to February; almost everything lies below the surface, everything that has been and is still to come. My feelings slowly rise through the thaws and freezes and push me out into the sun of early spring.