Winter

February 22, 2021

A touch of snow fell one night here a week ago, thick wet stuff that stuck to everything and looked clean and pretty the next morning. By noon it was gone, the South Carolina sun emerged over the Upstate. Still, a damp wind blew through for an afternoon. It’s winter, after all. But our winter is nothing next to the subfreezing ordeal of Texas, Oklahoma, elsewhere. Then last week’s storms swept southwest-northeast, mostly missing our corner of the country. It was blustery, though, so we complained.

Staying upbeat, I walked in mid-afternoon with the grandsons to the neighborhood park. The lawns of the surrounding homes were uniformly brown, the brown of that thick zoysia that grows everywhere around here. The sun shone enough to create the eerie half-light of midwinter, but didn’t ease the chill I felt as I watched them running back and forth between the slides and swings. I rubbed my hands together and stamped my feet.

Shakespeare and then John Steinbeck wrote of the winter of our discontent. We peer now at the darkness around us: the cruel bitterness of the weather; the pandemic slaughter; the poisonous fanaticism of political thugs; the reek of corruption that lingers after the recent presidential term. It is a winter of our hearts and minds. We stagger towards spring, waiting for vaccines, for leadership, for an end to the winter’s bleakness, for April, and a way out. “April is the cruelest month,” T.S. Eliot wrote in The Waste Land, “breeding lilacs out of dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”

Spring rain is coming. We know it. Meanwhile, those who know winter trade memories meant to soothe spirits: of Norman Rockwell Christmas scenes of horse-drawn sleighs, the snow gleaming in candlelight; lustrous white backyard and hillside snowfalls; the dark gleam of virgin ice over frozen lakes; even the carefree old photos of dad shoveling the driveway. The winters of our dreams.

I recall the blizzards of my college years in New Hampshire, when snow fell ferociously and blew sideways into massive drifts held back by snow fences the school erected every fall. Then we went to class. We skied through it at Gunstock, a steep place in the White Mountains, where you can look from the highest points out over Lake Winnipesaukee. But the memories are mixed. I had the bad luck to go through Marine Corps Officers Basic School near Quantico, Va., during winter, where at midnight the northern Virginia forest seemed the coldest place on earth. In Nashville, where we lived in the early 1980s, the temperature dipped one winter to -17F for three days, shutting down the city.

On yet another chilly, overcast afternoon we drove past the house we’re buying. The owner agreed to fix the few problems the inspection found. We looked the place over again, hoping not to find anything else wrong. We talked about painting walls and about tearing out the cramped, rotted deck, and cheerful things like planting flowers and vegetables, always futile in the deep shade of our Virginia backyard. But I stared at the emptiness of the yard, a level, bare piece of ground, missing suddenly my brick patio, my jungle of perennials, the steep, thickly wooded hill that gave the house the sense of a forest settlement. Here at the new place, we look past a small white picket fence, which separates our lot from someone else’s backyard.

We strolled up the block, or down the block, walking in the street because the lots are not bounded by sidewalks. The street is a dead end that just beyond our place inclines into a steep grade ending in a turnaround bordered by a vacant lot running down to thick woods. A creek wanders through a gulley. The underbrush is too dense to penetrate, apparently no one ventures through it. Winter has left the growth dead and brown, with spring it will turn into thick jungle.

We headed back up the hill. Past our place we turned onto a short stretch of asphalt that links our street with another that runs parallel to ours. Two streets to the entire subdivision. The other one is lined with two-level brick homes more spacious, more upscale than ours, probably way more expensive.

We looked about for the neighbors. At one home farther up our street two boys were tossing a football, a young girl was roller skating. I thought I saw their dad moving around in the garage but couldn’t be sure. We kept walking. It was getting chilly.

This is so grown-up, I thought. I couldn’t recall exploring much when we moved into our Virginia house. We had four little kids then keeping us busy. They met the neighbors before we did. Now that I recall, I met very few. Our community was full of transients, civil servants and military who moved in because the place was affordable, then disappeared after a few years, replaced by others like themselves. The subdivision was “non-HOA.” If you wanted to keep a car on blocks in the driveway, or an old washing machine on the porch, or a giant boat sitting in the street, you could. Some did. Thirty-three years later, our kids were gone. Then, as winter set in, so were we.

I’ve read that winter has hit northern Virginia hard, just enough snow to make driving dangerous, followed by the usual freezing rain. I put on a brave front the last few years, getting out with the running group in predawn darkness on our neighborhood course. But I recall one single-digit Saturday two years ago when we went a few miles on a forest trail. It was time. So here we are, still asking ourselves how we managed all this: a new city and a new home, on a street without sidewalks. Then too, new seasons. We’ll be in the new house soon. Spring is coming