For the love of winter

I’m not a person who spends a lot of time tabulating favorite this or that, so this logical place to say winter is my favorite season is left intentionally blank. There are aspects of each season which I admire. The huge overtime paychecks of spring and fall are hard to dismiss, for instance. I genuinely love to see the seasons change, that’s all.

But the coming of a winter season holds a special categorical place. Winter in North Dakota. Just made your hair stand on end, didn’t I? So let’s face that head on, because it’s for real. This is a brutal season in this place, and the unprepared and the uninformed will pay a steep tuition price in knowing better next time. I tend not to dwell on this a lot, and modern life has pushed nature back out of sight for most people, but the underlying realities haven’t changed.Cold weather wrecks stuff, and the colder the more wreckage. And some folks need their stuff in order to stay alive. That’s worth keeping in mind, just kind of humming in the background.

Generally, winter comes to me as a time to slow down. The balance of life is such that the long hours of the long days in summer are contrasted with the short days in winter. Northern peoples would work themselves to death if they had 16 hours of daylight year around! But now the sun is low at 4 30, and the feeling comes that what hasn’t gotten accomplished by now is just going to have to wait. Living above the frost line, that is, on the globe those parts of the world where soil freezes for some part of the year, gives us a sense of urgency to do all you can, while you can. A moment is coming on the calendar when you can’t anymore. That’s motivational. It’s exclusionary, also. There are things that don’t survive here. Bananas, for instance. On the other hand, pests and pestilences that haunt more comfortable climes are notably absent. It was minus 2 this morning, I didn’t swat a mosquito all day!

This is the time of year I like to focus on firewood making. The fuel for this current season is stacked up, ready to burn and I now  spend daylight hours when I can making wood for next year. I suppose if I didn’t love the work, it would seem daunting. The truth is, firewood making is never “done”. I take from one end of the pile in the yard, while adding new cut green wood to the other end. Then next year I will feed the stove from the opposite end where the wood has had a year to season. The wood fired kitchen stove was glowing, and Duchess was just excited to have all that cooktop hot at the same for cookies and stew and chili and a whistling teakettle. When I came to ND from my native Minnesota, I thought there were no trees here. Comparatively, there are less, but still plenty enough to feed a careful fire. It’s amazing how much heat and productivity can be coached from these old kitchen stoves. And the firebox is probably no bigger than the average microwave.

A light scatter of snow has fallen. Open winters without snow feel colder than ones with a heavy cover of snow. And the ice has grown thick enough to consider skates some bright afternoon or moonlit night. Bring on winter.