The first day of midwinter reflected a brilliant, blinding light off the white covered morning outside. My eyes closed. I let them recover. It had snowed the day before and everywhere the trees’ boughs, forks and twigs still held the load.
The night before, the outside temperature read two degrees Fahrenheit. By daytime, the arctic cold turned the sky a deep celestial blue. The rising sun burned to a white gold.
In a shoveled patch of grass and moss the snow glimmered its refracted light to red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. It looked as if a frozen rainbow fragment had shattered and scattered its sprites over the crystalline shrouded ground. Where the sun opposes the snow, if you look carefully, your eyes may catch these exquisite, fleeting colors.
I consider this a winter blessing.
Midafternoon, I hiked through woods behind my house to the Sweatt Preserve in Hopkinton. I reached the north end of the trail on its short loop where you come to a dark enchanting grove of hemlock at the bottom of a steep ravine. Its canopy is so dense that underneath is a glade with a soft bed of needles, now covered under a blanket of snow.
Year round the cold sinks here.
I walked away from the grove — now off the loop — up a knoll and down a short distance to a snow-covered footbridge over a stream. It’s one of many crossings. The stream, somewhat muted by ice and snow, features a few deep, clear pools and, as it descends, devotes its sound to the woodland.
Seeing and hearing this running water can dispose you to a quiet presence of mind.
The wind held the temperature to low teens that day. And though the trail had been tracked with snowshoes the entire way, I didn’t see a soul. I didn’t hear a living creature.
A profound solitude accompanies the wilderness of frigid winter.
About two weeks later, a bigger storm lingered in the continued biting cold. It took a couple of days for a foot of feather-weight snow to fall. Then it took two days to clean up around the house. On the third day, I returned to the Sweatt Preserve.
After the last storm I knew the depth of the snow in the woods would prove too difficult to wade, so I used snowshoes. Still, I labored. When I got to the loop, again, the trail had been tracked. The scene at the hemlock grove was so choked with snow, I didn’t recognize it without the usual references. Further, after the footbridge, the stream all but disappeared, except for one small opening near the trail. There you could hear the water’s deep, muffled babbling from under the ice and snow.
Beyond the opening, silence reigned.
The older I get, the more I love midwinter for its extended daylight and its sun’s promise of more. And I miss the cold near the end of autumn and at the start of winter — I can’t recall the last time we experienced sustained temperatures low enough for skating and ice fishing on ponds and lakes before the first significant snowfall. Early cold and light, dry snow were common winter occurrences until three decades ago.
In the March 3 overnight cold, three inches of snow fell. It was powder and easy to clear in the morning. But by afternoon, the temperature rose to 51degrees. From my window I saw a bleb hang from a twig, glinting rainbow colors, drop into the melting snow.