Winter dreams

Leaning toward light on the shortest days

Check in

As the year wind down...
Do less
Live more
Know that you are loved

Solstice

The shortest day of the year is Wednesday. By year’s end, the days will already be markedly longer on the 45th parallel, where I live, and soon it will be time for the equinox celebrations of Passover and Easter. Then the longest day, in June, and the Fourth of July, when children wait impatiently for it to be dark enough to see the fireworks. Just they fret impatiently for daylight in December so they can open their Christmas and Hanukkah presents.

Celebrate your day, however long it is. Celebrate the light and embrace the darkness, yang and yin, inseparable. These contrasts are within you, they become you, they define you.

In his novel Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami writes about two types of darkness: the darkness of the outside world before electricity, when nights were totally black, and the inner darkness of the subconscious. In earlier times, “this correlation between darkness and our subconscious, these two forms of darkness, was obvious to people. It wasn’t a metaphor, even,” the character Oshima explains.

People of those earlier eras, he continues, “probably couldn’t conceive of these two types of darkness as separate from each other. But today things are different. The darkness of the outside world has vanished, but the darkness in our hearts remains…”

Milestone

Today is our anniversary. Robert and I have been married for 18 years. Eighteen years of deepening love, of continually discovering what is real in the other. We are independent together, satisfied with our own company, comfortable in our own skins. We teach each other, we trade songs and stories, we explore the Universe together. Whatever we find, whatever we share on our journey, there is always more around the next bend.

Last year on our anniversary, Robert quoted Yeats (“When You Are Old”) to me: “But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.” He understands me like no one else ever has. His is my other half, my better half. His love helps me be a better—and freer—person.

Thank you, Robert. I love you.

At an anniversary restaurant dinner in pre-Covid times, we asked another diner to take a picture. Turned out he was a string player with the Oregon Symphony.

In the bleak midwinter

Christina Rossetti wrote the words to a lovely Christmas hymn

It begins like this:
In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Snow obscures the familiar, turning it into the stuff of dreams. Fran Gardner photo.

Season of authenticity

~Nowhere to hide. All that’s left is what’s real.~

My favorite season was once fall. The colors, the cool weather, the bright light slanting toward the solstice, the wind, the rainstorms, the new school year—change. I love change, and fall is all about that.

But now winter has supplanted fall. I am approaching the winter of my life, for one thing. I am also a Capricorn, a winter sign.

When fall leaves are gone, all the street trees in my neighborhood are bare in their essence, their blackened boughs a tracery against the lowering gray sky. The architecture of those grand trees is everywhere visible. No dissembling. Nature stripped to its elements.

Here in Portland, street trees are mostly maples and elms, ash and weeping birch, with the occasional catalpa or horse chestnut. More rare are stately liquidambars (sweet gum), which sport the most beautiful fall color, and tough-guy oaks.

As I move into my 70s, winter’s solitude draws me to engage with the season. I want to sit in that enormous chair like Eliza Doolittle, resting and reflecting and writing. I meditate, listen to music, read, knit or piece quilt blocks, dream winter dreams.

I love winter food—thick stews, hearty soups, oatmeal and Christmas cookies, cocoa and eggnog and hot buttered rum. Increasingly, those foods are more honored in memory. I haven’t had eggnog in, I don’t know, 20 years? Does it matter?

One of the things about aging is memory becomes a simulacrum of experience. Now that I can’t tolerate sugar, the memory of a Mars bar—taste, texture, even smell—suffices. As for hot buttered rum, it’s an idea, a winter meme, a taste suggested by the butterscotchy memory of butter rum LifeSavers.

Winter’s memory is a trickster. We remember sleigh rides in the snow even though we’ve never been near a sleigh. I crave winter experiences I will never have—ice fishing in a little hut dragged onto a lake. Joining the Polar Bears as I wade—or dive!— into icy water with dozens of other enthusiasts. Watching a lone deer pick its way through the snow outside the window of the alpine cabin I’ll never own. I can taste the salt lick.

As we age, earliest memories come to the fore. I spent my first years in  in International Falls, Minn., later moving to the Minneapolis area. Snow was a given. My brothers piled snow 10 feet high one year as they shoveled the driveway in Bloomington. I’ll never know how Mom backed the car blindly past those towers onto busy West 90th Street.

Fall is Keats’s “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” Winter is my season to dream of snow and solitude.

Treelike trusses in a Dublin church, probably Christ Church Cathedral. Fran Gardner photo.

Winter song

Cathedrals
Are best built
In winter,
Miming arched trees and crouched snow,
Spires and saints sculpted of cold, cold stone.

Inside, space with no heat,
So cold, the congregants
Worship amid their frozen breath.
Clouds of it wash the weeping walls;
Snow escapes in, sketching flurries on the pavement.

In the north, where rivers freeze, 
Men harvest blocks of ice.
For the cathedral, blocks of granite,
Marble, chalcedony, quartz.
Slate.
Sheets of copper,
Left to mellow to virdigris—
The green patina of age, not spring.

Each day the river in Oregon, 
Too swift to freeze,
Reflects a new element:
	Clotted mercury
	Glittering sapphire
	Milky pearl
	Dirty jade
	Warm opal
	Cold steel
Depending on the nature of the sky.

On a frozen lake
Far east of Oregon
Where winters matter more,
We ran on the ice
And tried to skate backward (it’s all in the hips),
Swaying in motion.

Come, memory says,
Dance to winter.
Let the cold refine us.
So cold, our fingers burn like fire.

The grandkids were part of a virtual Christmas pageant. Photo © Maggie Gardner

Check out

Please tell me you are still writing. Remember that writing well is the best revenge. One good book on writing: One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers, by Gail Sher. Another good book: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King.

Soul hygiene

I love ancient Greek, and the word “hygiene” comes (via a convoluted path I won’t bore you with) from ὑγίεια, “health” in ancient Greek. There’s even a Greek goddess of health, Hygieia.

But I don’t like the phrases “hygiene” is often linked to, like “dental hygiene” or “sleep hygiene.” But “soul hygiene,” that could work. Yes.

Hygienically, for the good of your soul, to keep it scrubbed clean and smelling fresh, you need to do something creative.

Writing is one universal way of creating. But what if you don’t want to write? Try something else.

Draw. Or quilt. Paint a room. Take up the ukulele or tin whistle. Make radish roses. Knit a coat for your little dog.

Or make pompoms. Here’s how:

Help me out here

I inadvertently bought a whole year of IMDb Pro access. I needed to contact a scriptwriter about a project I later decided not to publish, and I neglected to cancel before the trial period was over. No cancellations allowed.

So, since I have this extra access and will be underutilizing it, I’d at least like to share it. If you would like to research with IMDb Pro, email me. It won’t cost you anything. I can’t give you my sign-on, but I can search on your behalf.

One last share

Here’s something I hate to do: Refold paper bags.

I can’t even be bothered to take a decent photo.

It’s just not a task I want to waste my patience units on. It’s hard to refold all the seams. Then, if you use the bag, you have to open it up again and there goes all your hard work.

Give me an umbrella any day. At least umbrellas fold themselves.

Graceful exit

~Too late~

That’s it for another week. Next week, on the calm Monday that is the day after Christmas, I’ll talk about reading poetry and memorizing poems.

Till then, remember I love you.

—30—