Losing Winter's Order

Winter is my favorite season, but as I chipped at the ice of the last freezing rain/ice storm/blizzard of February, even I thought, “Enough is enough.” So for once I sympathized with those burdened by snow and cold. Recently, I heard such a person say she really disliked the loss of familiar markers and paths.

It had never before crossed my mind that this might be painful, because I’m delighted each year when square city lines disappear under amorphous snow piles.

In winter the choices of ordinary folks, and earth processes, swamp the plans of civic engineers. Sidewalks become sinuous channels narrowing and widening erratically. Getting to them means crossing diminutive mountain passes on twisty, one-foot-wide tracks – between parking meters buried up to their necks. Trails meander idiosyncratically over any large, flat space - a park, an unplowed walkway. The first to cross walked as they wanted and everyone else followed – previous footsteps offering some protection against sinking in deep.

My way home from high school crossed recent landfill. Wandering a snaking path across the snow, I imagined several miles thickness of ice below my feet, and that my destination was a handful of huddled yurts lost in a wintry waste as vast as space.

But I was raised by a woman who more than fulfilled her teenage goal of traveling the world. Holding back in fear of the unknown was not allowed to her children, and she never indulged our desire for familiar toys, clothes, food, homes, schools, friends or household routine. Not only did I follow my mother by traveling, even my scientific work explored trackless wilderness.

It takes a certain comfort with pathlessness to shuck the security of worldly success – job, house and social connections – for a monastery, especially when your family culture contains no such concept. Certainly, among those Catholic sisters I often felt as if I were in a country more foreign than any I’d lived in as a child. It was my mother's training that made it possible.

Of course, despite near-record snow piles, this winter has really been nothing compared to pre-global warming decades. We barely dipped below 0º F. In those years, we had several weeks of minus 40º. Then, our last blizzard was in mid-April - invariably canceling my youngest brother’s April 9th birthday party.

We may yet have another blizzard, but winter has lost its grip. During a handful of 40º days, rushing water filled the gutters as the snow mountains beat a retreat, baring strips of muddy grass buried months ago. On mornings moist with spring, mist hovered over the snow fields - thawed and refrozen into course granules. Like little glaciers, the melting snow gave up all it once carried in suspension: pebbles, branches, trash, city grit. Concentrated on a diminishing surface, debris turns the old piles a rough, dull black, and where their mountainous edges once pushed back the street, only minute moraines of rubbish are left.

All the winter-haters are lifting their heads to sniff the air, and planning gardens. Total strangers grin and greet each other with glad cries, excitedly chattering over winter’s end.

I try hard to smile back, but already I sorely miss the sharp clarity of ice cold.

And I hate to see the return of square-edged, human-made order. As the markers with which we claim the earth shake free of snow, we can once again imagine we own this place. But we don’t. Each winter we are offered a chance to see how a little nature undoes all we build, yet leaves us perfectly capable of surviving – if we bend our needs to the weather’s necessity.

The Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí said, “Straight lines belong to men, but curves belong to God.” We expend huge amounts of energy to maintain our little, spider web of straight-line roads across the globe, but all the while messy, exuberant, creative earth, and God, are the real bosses.

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