Kinship with winter

Warmer seasons bolster my spirits, what with their colors and long days and, well, warmth. But truly I feel a kinship with winter. This snowy weather especially tugs at my insides.

As I ride along country roads and into the small towns nearby, the snow highlights for me quiet cemeteries. The graveyard monuments seem more at home in the cold and gray than in the heat of summer. There is no foliage to distract the eye from the harsh reality of their meaning. Plastic flowers obscenely strike a tone of inappropriate gaiety. Dilapidated and decaying Christmas decorations remaining long past the season act as a truer indicator of grief and loss than stones telling nothing of the people left behind. I see you, cemetery. I understand.

There are abandoned farmhouses along my travel routes as well. In the snow, enormous, skeletal oaks and maples stand sentinel around a deteriorating shell of a home. Overgrown azaleas and rhododendrons are exaggerated and haunting, shielding porches and doorways. The black of empty windows call out to me. "I used to be someone's dream," they say. There is no summer ivy now to lend a romantic air to the sense of desertion, to cheer one with the idea of the inevitable triumph of nature. I hear you, abandoned farmhouse. I understand.

The fields are still mostly covered with a thick blanket, smooth and white. From a distance their perfection is lovely and calming. Yet they entice corruption, and not just from me. Crows, hawks and blackbirds swoop, land, burrow, and flee - attempting to unearth something, anything of substance from the cold barrier hiding the land. And I am well aware that underneath the smooth frosting there are murdered plants and wretched, cold mud. I see you, winter fields. I understand.

With a forecast of additional snow tonight into Friday, and the calendar's promise of another full month of winter, I will hunker down and wrap the season around me for a time. We are kindred spirits, after all.