The Measure of Our Winter Days

Beau and I are out and about early on winter mornings, but salt and icy pavement are not kind to his toes so we keep our ramblings brief. After our first outing, we return home and fill bird feeders in the garden. Then we put a little something out for the squirrels who are having a difficult time too. When I pull draperies open in the morning, the first thing I see is their delicate footprints in the snow on the deck.

Indoors, heaps of reading material, candles, potions, puckish pursuits and small eccentricities are the measure of our winter days. Ditto sketchbooks, baking, baskets of mending, researching oddities like building igloos and straw houses, pottery, spinning and making pasta. The soup cauldron has a place of honour on the stove in winter, and there is always a pot of something or other bubbling away on it. Then there is the old "what else can I do with this eggplant" exercise. Failing anything else, I plot another garden bed, pummel bread or make scones. Out of my midwinter restlessness, good and comforting things occasionally come.

If the weather was a little warmer, we would be checking out local bookshops and shopping for art supplies like sketchbooks and watercolor pens, but that is unlikely to happen for a while. Thankfully, shelves in the study contain a lovely stash of yarn, scraps of fabric (the powsels and thrums of Alan Garner's incandescent memoir), ribbon, paper, paint, and sticky stuff to keep us out of trouble. First and foremost (of course), there are books. There are never too many about, and passing a tottering heap of friends as yet unknown is always a happy thing. 

It is tempting to embrace the notion that life becomes smaller in winter, but that is simply not so. Like our magnificent universe, like this dear little blue world, like the Great Round of time and the seasons in which we spend our allotted days, life continues to expand - we are simply reaching outward in different ways.