I can’t think of many things more magical than falling snow, but I’ve always had terrible circulation. Yet, I can remember a few precious years of not noticing the cold, even long after it had stung my cheeks and seeped deep into my bones. My father would have covered any potentially exposed skin with fleece and waterproof-lined down, executing daily on his secret trick. If you put your mittens on before sliding your arms down the sleeve of your winter coat, you form a protective seal– avoiding that freezing gap left otherwise at your wrists. When you walk outside like that, bundled up in care from head to toe, you don’t feel the chill at your back when you lie flat in a snowdrift. You see the stark bluebird sky above, and the way everything sharply sparkles in the cold. You notice if the snow feels powdery or packable; can you build a snowman, or will you take sleds to the hillside?
To not find “misery in the sound of the wind,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man” believes that “ One must have a mind of winter,” and “have been cold a long time” (8, 1,4). The poem suggests that to accept winter, one needs to have forgotten the satisfaction of a warmer time. Remembering anything less bare and biting than January will only bring a feeling of bitterness for what used to be. Ultimately, “the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” (13-15). For a poem entitled “The Snow Man,” the sentiment that winter’s listener must be empty himself in order to accept the emptiness around him struck me as strange. Snowmen, the product of play, should represent a certain kind of joy. Here, the snow man has grown frozen himself, filled with the numbness of winter and none of its bliss.
Really, you can grit your teeth through winter, or just accept its bitterness. I think that truly loving winter entails entering it in a way that permits you to love it; to wrap yourself up in warmth that will last long enough for you to access the priorities of childhood. To be able to play, protected from the elements. I was a lucky enough kid to know a well-lit home, where I could eventually run to as dusk fell. If we’re all to be faced with January’s cold despair, we all deserve to know the kind of care that seals out the cold.
