In the Wings
This year, it’s been hard to reconcile the reality of the calendar with the weather we’ve been having. For weeks now, even as we march toward Thanksgiving looming on the near horizon, temperatures have hovered in the 60s, defying normal-for-this-time-of-year averages.
Such a stretch of unseasonably warm weather makes it almost easy to slip back, if not into mid-summer, at least early autumn. Before most of the songbirds vanished and cedar waxwings gorged on the last ripened berries. Before harvests had been toted in cords and bales, pounds and pecks.
Whether here in Chicago or on the island, the urgency of preparation is long over. Deck furniture is stowed. Firewood is split and stacked. Hauled ashore boats are shrink-wrapped. Snow blowers are gassed and plows rigged onto the front ends of pick-ups. Acorns are cached and squirrel nests lined with another layer of dried leaves. In the city, along Lake Shore Drive, snow fences are erected and evergreens bordering busy roads have been burlapped against snowplow-hurling slush laced with salt. Whatever’s winged and winters elsewhere has flown.
Though the trees, even the oaks, have lost all their leaves, I still have to work hard to remind myself they’ll be bare for another six months, just as, when it’s 65 and the sun is warm on my face, it’s not only easier to resist thoughts of mid-January but that, in intentionally doing so, I somehow help to make the months ahead milder.
But now, and much more seasonal, temperatures have begun to dip. Nights, the furnace hums. Absences grow more palpable. In what feels like a rising tide of dormancy and retreat, urgency gives way to stillness. Anticipation becomes, and so unlike spring’s, a quiet expectation. “Any day now,” the world of a northern hemisphere seems to whisper.
Even now, after having made our annual pilgrimage from alarm clock to microwave to coffeemaker and adjusted the time, reclaiming the hour that back in spring was lost, but which, with this autumnal shift and days darkening so much sooner, always seem to me instead like the loss, there is a pause. A hush.
In it, winter waits. Just off stage, poised for its imminent cue. Winter waits, and we do, too, as nights grow colder and longer and less energy from the sun reaches the ground. This busy city pauses too, but some days, in all its fortified protection and unstoppable jangle, it seems inured to signs of waiting. Not so on the island where it’s always felt to me like there is so much waiting. For seasons to change, lobsters to shed, fog to lift, rain to fall, sap to run, frost to leave the ground, ice cakes to empty the cove. For an eaglet to fledge, ospreys to return, the power to come back on. For a solo fisherman to pull back into harbor. For a woodstove’s flame to catch.
One morning soon, we'll wake to frost encrusting the fallen leaves. Another cold night will follow. And then another. Water in the topsoil will freeze. The temperature will drop, enough so that at marsh or pond’s edge, water molecules will slow their molecular momentum and form ice crystals on stems, twigs and leaves, and, with other crystals create an icy lattice in the nights that follow. From a clotted sky, snowflakes will spiral. There’ll be wind and drifts.
Winter, and the world, as though stripped of its essentials, will again close in on itself. As will we.
As now, we wait.
