Face First

As if we hadn’t been warned. As if we couldn’t just feel the party winding down. As if we couldn’t have guessed what a fifty degree drop in temperature might mean, still we got caught wearing thin outerwear, and large numbers of us crashed our cars on black ice coming home from work. All of us plunging face-first into winter.

Like most mornings of big change, this one was indistinct - without markers or warnings that most of us could read. I sat jacket-less on my second floor porch, letting the sun beat down on my head, hoping to coax my brain into the demands of day. I looked north, across a row of orderly rooftops, beyond the middle school parking lot, past the Tires Plus and the Home Depot, way up to the horizon, where a solid wall of arctic clouds had assembled itself on the northern plains. The top side of the cloud bank looked benign, if not festive, with whisps of white tossed up against bright blue. But the side facing us, the advancing front, was blurry gray and troubled. I guessed this was the thing the late night weather lady had been hyping for days. I pictured her in a little inset box in my sky, urgent red dress and printed scarves, gesturing broadly with little fingertip flourishes at the end of each sweep, like serifs.

Within the hour trash cans began tumbling up and down the alley. Lawn furniture slammed into privacy fences and cushions were sent flying into neighbor’s yards. The wind chimes on my front porch thrashed against the side of the house so vigorously that by the time I went out to investigate they had already chipped dozens of little gouges out of the siding. So winter is here, I thought.

Like anyone caught unprepared, my first responses were haphazard. I made a quick inventory of the garden plants still producing fruit. A handful of too-slow tomatoes, some pinkish raspberries, and a ground-cherry bush. Each had failed to get the memo that summer was over. I deemed each plant healthy enough to protect, and suddenly found myself spreading plastic sheeting over them, complicit in their folly, as if the sustained sub-freezing temperatures could be endured. As if the door to our protracted Indian summer could swing open again in a few days.

The weather lady insists we will lose another twenty degrees by tomorrow night. “A 70 degree drop in 72 hours,” she gleefully proclaims. And just like that my sudden reality-check goes completely surreal, so I poke around for some corroborating perspective. An App I use for mountaineering informs me that the current temperature on top of 14,443’ Mount Elbert, Colorado’s highest peak, is several degrees warmer than Denver, where I live. Then I check in on Barrow, Alaska, the northern-most city in America, on the shores of the Arctic ocean. Their current temperature is also several degrees warmer than where I live. So that pretty much settles it. Time to “winterize.”

The seasonal adjustments we are suddenly forced to make seem ill-timed and ugly, but all of that work is mundane and soon forgotten. We’ll move the long-johns up into the underwear drawer. The tire-pressure warning light will come on in our cars. We’ll change the furnace filter. None of these things are worth mentioning, save that they occasion the ancient and natural inward-turning of the human psyche. We are bio-chemical creatures, after all, mammals that respond physically and emotionally to the shorter days. We are driven indoors where we must create our own warmth. We invent rituals to commemorate our harvests, these passages from light to dark. Whether it’s Christmas or Festivus or just a Black Friday spending splurge, we seek - in terms both sacred and profane - to cope with the demands of a season of darkness.

The rose blooming by my front steps seems perfectly untouched by the deep freeze. I take my glove off to touch the flower, expecting that velvety, slightly waxy feel of the petals. Instead the flower breaks off and disassembles as it falls. The petals sound like potato chips tumbling down through the branches.

The conceit bubbling up in this meditation is that, at least here in Colorado, the sun is always about to pop out. Even after we dive down to a new record low temperature tomorrow night, the clouds will lift and reveal enough snow on the peaks to begin fueling the endless sporty diversions we need to get through our comparatively sunny winter. That’s just how it’ll be. It’s not that the winters here are easy, but they are maybe a little more purposeful - or we make them so, at least. As for me, those frozen flower petals are already in my freezer, like the others I picked over the summer. I’ll use them in a spiced wine I’ll be starting any day. Should be drinkable by next summer. In this way I can round off the corners between the seasons, carrying the fruits and labor of one season into the next, trying as I do every year, to make winter a useful time. To swallow it, rather than let it swallow me.