Another way of looking at the Paperwhites:

Winter, Love

Inside the window, paperwhites
lean jealously against the glass,
appraise the falling snow
for signs that it will not surpass
their raw ability to bring
glory to a winter hour.
But what do the narcissus know?
Saturated with delight
as the glass reflects their faces,
each ice crystal is a flower
to the viewer it displaces,
winter passionate as spring
fields of bloom on frozen lawn
harvest what they grow upon.

first published in Bluestem Magazine
http://bluestemmagazine.com/online/december-2015/winter-love/

We did get more snow, but the weather here has gotten cranky and they say the snow will be rained out and snowed back again before January is over. Something like that is going on outside right now – hard to say whether what’s falling is rain or snow. I saw footprints that looked suspiciously like the woodchuck, who should be asleep in her burrow until next month. She would not have seen her shadow this morning, but there’s nothing for her to eat so she’d be wise to go back to sleep. I wonder if she knows about Punxsutawney Phil. How did he end up getting all the woodchuck glory? Do you have to be a male woodchuck to get the job, and if so, how do we know Punxsutawney Phil qualifies? Did some foreign agency help him out? Are the deer behind this? I wouldn’t put anything past the deer.

The narcissus bulbs I potted up indoors after Christmas are starting to bloom, filling the space vacated by outgoing bells, holly, and red ribbons with snow-colored flowers and head-spinning scent. It’s said that their fragrance, rather than their appearance, is responsible for their name: Narcissus, intoxicating to the wood nymphs. In English, we call this variety, the one that’s too tender to be outdoors in northern climates, the paperwhite. This name is most agreeable to a writer; and maybe that’s what makes me put so many of them into saucers full of pebbles or pots of dirt, set them near my desk, water them, and hope. Other narcissi – big yellow jonquils, white, yellow, and even pink daffodils – are waiting patiently in their beds in the yard and garden, for spring. Because I nudge the paperwhites into bloom in January, they represent winter to me, not spring: winter as pure beauty. Winter to be appreciated for itself, not as a way-station to somewhere else. This is how I look at them, as a kind of indoor snow, but the paperwhites themselves lean against the window glass. They grow toward the slowly increasing hours of light.

No sooner did the hysterical promises of extra-super-delivery-in-time-for-Christmas catalogs slack off, than the deluge of seed catalogs began.  I’m as into seed catalogs as the next person – well, okay, I’m way more into seed catalogs than the actual next person, since that’s Doug – but really, I need a break. I need to look out the window at the yard and garden and be at rest. At peace with the pilfering deer and marauding woodchuck, the weeds, the weather, the kinky hoses. If the seed catalogs come, can the garlic mustard be far behind?

Besides, I have some issues to work out before I go near the seed catalogs. Maybe some New Year’s resolutions would help. Resolved: to stop raising forty seven tomato plants from seed when I can squeeze out room in my garden for thirty at the most. Resolved: to limit myself to three kinds of cosmos and four of zinnias instead of getting carried away, which that is not, in case you wondered.

But I resolved long ago to make only resolutions I’m able to keep, and these aren’t them. Though I have turned their faces to the wall, the seed catalogs lurk. Red cheeks of tomato porn and promises of their happy and fruitful consummation with companion-planted marigolds gleam in the late-winter light as I sit by the window, trying to ignore them. The window’s not helping, because the snow is temporarily gone, and the lawn is strangely green.

Come back, snow, I need you. You’ll get your own time off again in April.

Our white Christmas held, though temperatures hovered on the edge of snowmelt. The longest night of the year was past, hours of daylight not obviously growing but very clearly not shrinking any more. Doug put on his Santa hat to bring cookies to the neighbors; I queued up my extensive playlist of Christmas music.

This holiday means many things to many people, and nothing annoys one group like being told what it means to another. The Christian, the Secular, the Druidical, all sides have made arguments for ownership. The central factor in everybody’s story is light overcoming darkness, yet there are partisans unwilling to concede even that their stories have a central factor, let alone what it is. Trying to convince each other of the truth of your faith is difficult, because religious feeling is like love. When you love someone, you know it – it has perhaps hit you over the head with great insistence – but when you try to explain it to somebody else, well, you sound like a babbling idiot. Why do you love him? Because he’s wonderful. This is woefully lacking in detail. The only way anyone will understand it is, if they have been or are in love themselves, and recognize the futility of explanation. Emotional truth is not susceptible to logical argument.

I find that readings of the Christmas story don’t do much for me, with their words that fly in the face of experience. But carols are something else. The music carries with it the feelings of hope, of yearning for goodness, for love, for reassurance that life will go on, that are the universal aspirations of humankind. Music, like love, rises above the need for explanation.

We woke up on the 26^th to a warm rain and a world of fog. A row of deer stood in the backyard, silhouettes barely visible in the mist, like Santa’s off shift taking a well-earned break. It will be cold and snowy again, and soon, but today the grass stands up for the deer to graze, and no wind blows. Life is good.

The sun has come out and the snow is all sparkles, glitter, sequins, and blue shadows, never settling on being just one kind of thing, keeping its options open. It looks so substantial I’m surprised to find my boots sinking into it when I step onto the porch. With a few light sweeps of my broom it flies off like a flock of startled birds rising into the air together, but I see that where I stepped before sweeping, the broom has left behind a perfect, icy image of my bootsole on the concrete. Once I noticed this I took a few steps here and there, sweeping in between, checking it out, until there was something like a dance chart on my doorstep. How to tango with the snow.

Squirrels do seem to pass mostly over the top of it, leaving shallow imprints. Deer leave deep trails that look like they’ve been cross-country skiing. Winter dark comes so early and lasts so long, I don’t see much of the actual deer in late December. I see evidence of them written in the snow, a perfect map to the Deer Highway System, its on-ramps, and its rest stops. These are color photos, but look black and white because I took them at dusk, standing on my balcony looking down. No people walked across this yard. Some other animal tracks are mixed in there, but it’s mainly the deer, high-stepping when they leap with hurry, slow-dragging when they take their time. They prospect in the herb garden, but are disappointed in what they find. This is why the plants there are still standing. But the herd increases every year, so the deer know what they’re doing.

Winter is easy to deal with in Michigan because the inhabitants know it well. Streets are plowed, sidewalks are shovelled, and people who can’t be cheerful in the cold leave for Florida. I knew it was a good sign when I realized the state was shaped like a mitten.

The first snowstorm of the season arrived, on a Sunday, like a sacrament. We were waiting, wondering what happened to it, and then it fell all day, all night, over the tired, empty flowerpots of November, until their frost-wilted remains, no longer a rebuke, were transfigured. We heard the plow scraping in the night as it passed under the second-story bedroom window, and woke to find every twig of each tree made bold with a thick white brushstroke. Monday morning dawned to ten inches of stacked and powdery snow altering shapes and altering perception: a forgotten cushion, an upturned tub, a sledding hill for hardy squirrels, all these were potential to every windblown drift. School, we heard, would be cancelled. Is there such a thing as a child who does not root for the snow?

Zerlina is a California cat. The first time she saw snow falling, she pressed against the window and craned her neck, trying to see up into the sky for whatever was causing this unknown phenomenon. It could have been a flock of big white birds shedding their feathers; I like to think she was hoping for that. We opened a door for our transplanted indoor cat, pretty sure she wouldn’t go far. She took two steps out into the snow, stopped, took the same two steps back – unstepping them – and went and stood on the heat register. She has shown occasional interest since then, and even tested the snow another time or two. Finding it equally cold on each occasion, she has since decided snow is best ignored.

Later in the season I will agree with her, but the first snows show you all over again how beautiful everything is if you stop to look at it. Each of the four seasons does this as it shifts, and it’s luscious to wallow in having these changes right at your door, no driving into mountains or deserts required. They come miraculously, automatically, a gift just for existing. By March I will be hungry for spring, but though I might prefer to adjust the number of months allowed each season – more to autumn, say, or cut February altogether – I do not want to do without them. They restore, inspire, refresh and reanimate as they rotate the world through its possibilities, and I go along for the ride.

The first week of December marks, for me, the end of fall and start of winter. I toss out the pumpkins, which usually means wading through snow either to reach the compost pile, or to pick a squirrel-worthy spot where I can watch the process of discovery. But so far this year snow has been a casual visitor, stopping in for tea and gone again in a matter of hours. Fall temperatures linger, but as hours of daylight continue their decline the garden drifts deeper and deeper into sleep.

The catmint is still green. I step in it on purpose, so my cat will flip all over my feet when I go back in the house. In the garden I fasten down the lid on the cold frame to keep the wind from catching it and pulling it off.

Kicking up leaves instead of making snowy footprints as I walk into the woods, I’m looking out for forgotten tools when the first thing I find is a surprise – a dead elm tree has fallen over. When did this happen? I didn’t hear a thing, which I guess proves that if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, it falls just the same. Though it’s possible one of the neighbors heard it.

Doug’s in the front yard putting in snow stakes to guide our plow service through the curve of the driveway, keeping them off the flowerbeds.

“Did you hear the tree fall in the back yard?” I ask.

“What tree?” he says, ambiguously. I bring him around back to affirm this independent action taken by the universe. He sizes it up and figures he can get about half of it with his chain saw. Home-grown firewood, an unexpected crop.

All the garden tools are hibernating safely in the garage, the squirrels have already found the pumpkins, and a cardinal, bright ornament, sits looking down on them, interested in the seeds. This evening a few deer will join them, breaking up the harder rinds with their sharp hoofs, and together they will dispose of this wayward harvest before enough snow falls to cover it.

On Thanksgiving morning I go out with my clippers and cut fat bunches of sage and thyme to decorate the turkey platter. It was a pleasure, when I moved here, to find that these stayed green all winter in Michigan, looking lovely along the walkway, covered with frost.

My turkey platter is a family heirloom, designed  with the traditional scene of the First Thanksgiving: pilgrims standing around looking hungry while Indians bring them corn, pumpkins, turkeys, and other local food. Every year when we go around the table and say what we’re thankful for, one thing that comes up, specifically, is that those first inhabitants met the newcomers with charity, fed them, and taught them how to get on in their new environment. We instinctively want to extend that welcome. It’s not possible to meet a foreign traveler in November, without feeling the urge to gather them into the dining room for the National Feast, and take satisfaction explaining to them the mysteries of cranberry sauce, stuffing, and pumpkin pie.

Thanksgiving is a very weird time for people to be complaining about immigrants and refugees. But it’s been a weird year.

The garden’s quiet in late November. The last bulbs are planted; the last of the expired flower stalks are in the compost bin; more perennials, chosen to provide variety – we might even say diversity – are tucked in with mulch. Monoculture in the garden breeds disease. A good metaphor. I can walk around the yard, at least, with an enormous sense of peace.

It wasn’t until I moved to Ann Arbor that I went to a football game. Growing up, my experience of football was to walk through the room where my father was watching it on tv, see two lines of guys in helmets crash into each other, and hear my father yell “Idiots! Idiots!” This was not a compelling reason to sit down and watch the game. Eventually I learned to sit and watch it with Doug, who explained it much better than my Dad did.

But football permeates the air in Ann Arbor. Swaths of blue printed with large yellow block M’s are everywhere, including on people’s heads and chests. Streets downtown become suddenly deserted on autumn Saturday afternoons. You can go to a concert of Beethoven or Mozart and at intermission find half the women in the ladies room checking another kind of score on their smart phones. So when a neighbor offered us tickets to a real live game, I was curious and wanted to go.

It turned out to be a lot like attending the opera: a large stage; an engaged audience intent on letting the players know what they thought of the performance; fans who cared about it more than seemed sane; divas throwing tantrums over actions that were open to interpretation. I thought it was pretty wonderful and, like opera, completely different being in the same building with it, compared to watching a broadcast.

But a few days ago we went to the best football game ever. After struggling in the first two acts, our heroes came back after intermission, um, halftime, to overcome all difficulties in the third. Then in the fourth the magic happened: as it began to get dark, the first snow of the year came swirling down, backlit by tall racks of lights. The big stadium turned into a snowglobe. Snow feathered the teams, the fans; offense and defense threw up rooster tails of glitter while the disembodied voice of officialdom said, “the ball is somewhere near the middle of the field” and cheerleaders lay down to make snow angels. We won; it ended; players sledded, laughing, on their stomachs, threw snowballs, and made snow angels too. The whole sky had opened up in an ovation, crazy, generous. Just like opera.

And just what we needed. We were aching and sore from the difficult, muddy election we all dragged ourselves through, the one where the polls were unanimous that what everyone really wanted was for it to be over, but for the majority of us the end was a heartbreak. Like opera, the game and the snow remind us that setbacks exist to be overcome, that what looks like darkness can brighten in unexpected ways. There’s always possibility, and that’s something to be grateful for.

I’m standing here next to a big pile of mulch, thinking how much it resembles politics: a heap of shredded trash which can work for good or for ill depending on how it’s applied. This election featured a lot of truth getting suffocated while a lot of weeds were nourished. It was discouraging to realize that a woman candidate for President could not be treated fairly. It was hard to see those who never had the experience of hitting their heads against the glass ceiling continuing to pretend it wasn’t there. You don’t see it? Of course you don’t see it, it’s not visible, that’s why they call it a glass ceiling. But if you step back for a good look you can see the supports that hold it up. They were mortared sturdily into place with the architecture of thousands of years of cultural expectations upheld as natural law. But still, each fresh assault weakens them; one day they will collapse. I’m sorry that day was not now.

Autumn stayed warm and beautiful this year right up through election day. Then the results of the election came in and brought with them a killing frost, and all the bright, wonderful, colored leaves fell from the trees. So now my choices are, sit inside moping about the coming winter, or put on my jacket and go back out. I have more bulbs to plant. I have that big pile of mulch to spread – it’s an actual mulch pile, not a metaphorical one, but in either case it’s my job to spread it where it will feed the best elements of the garden and suffocate the destructive ones. I’ll also take notes on what worked and what didn’t this time, because the success of next year’s garden depends on understanding what happened in the last one. This can be a lot harder to figure out than you’d think, or like, or hope. For gardens just like it is for politics.