In the dark days of winter, I kindle the light within

It’s gray, it’s somewhere just above freezing, and there’s enough moisture in the air to sustain fish. The sun has indicated a lack of interest in this part of the world. It is not pouting so much as deciding that its talents are better appreciated elsewhere. Here in western Oregon, our eyes are so accustomed to the darkness that the oven light makes us squint. In short, it’s the dead of winter.

My friends in Maine hoot at me for calling anything that merely flirts with freezing “the dead of winter.” But for most people, this season presents its own challenges to the spirit. Many locals scamper to the sunny South this time of year, and many more install a portable sun-in-a-box in their houses from which they hope to reabsorb their will to live. 

I am among the group that thrives under cloud cover, even if the cover reaches all the way to the ground. My last vacation was in Alaska. In February. The sun barely sniffs the horizon there before snapping back into its shell, and that suits me just fine.

Instead of pining for brighter days, sometimes I hole up in our little mountain cabin an hour east of Portland in Mount Hood. It’s even darker and damper there. Tall trees fend off a good portion of the natural light, and the electrical variety is never guaranteed. We’re always one good gust of wind away from hurtling back to a previous century, complete with candles, an oil lamp, and a wood fire, the glow from which sets up camp in our very souls. 

It’s been raining for months, and everywhere we look it’s emphatically green. Even the roof carries an ecstasy of moss. 

So we bundle up in front of the little fire in the woodstove until it warms the air. Our thoughts untangle against its glow, lose the constraints of language, become primal. We don’t know where they wander off to, but trust they’ll be back in time for supper. Or we take a nap, that gift to grown-ups who are free of obligation, our books splayed open on our chests. For all the relief of an air-
conditioning unit in the summertime, there is nothing like a fire in winter.

Also? The place scoffs at cellphones. The internet in any form has not yet punched its way through these woods. A bemused friend who once borrowed the place reported that her teenagers were stretched halfway out of the windows on the second floor with their phones held out, trying to get closer to the bountiful sky. For these children, the Dark Ages had returned, in every sense. They were lost, disconsolate. What was there to do? 

My friend can be forgiven for snickering. She’s old enough to remember the Before Times. It takes a little while for our devices to withdraw their tentacles and permit our spirits to reinflate. But it will happen. It will feel as clean as a deep breath of this thoroughly rinsed air.

What is there to do? Here’s one thing. Books get read here. 

Books get written here.

I know my comfort in times of low light is not particularly normal. I don’t claim any credit for it; it’s nothing I studied for. Maybe temperament is congenital. Maybe I owe mine to some imagined Viking forebears. 

My neighbor John is Cuban, and he’s got his house painted in sun-flare yellow and siren red and dragon-breath purple and so on, inside and out. It’s a neighborhood attraction and I admire it a lot, but I couldn’t live there. It would feel like my house was shouting at me. 

John’s tropical blood was kindled with parrots and flowers and constant visual stimulation. But the farther from the equator you get, the more the color drains out of the birds and flowers and animals and people. 

Here, the closest we get to the tropics in the winter is our dear and dauntless Anna’s hummingbird, a seasonal exclamation point, flashing like a sequin in the snow, its brilliance no bigger than a comma. 

But we all have some light from within and mine, at least, burns brighter against the gray. Bare branches finger and rearrange the sky, and sometimes stars drill into it and mountains sharpen themselves against it. 

Summer is nice enough, like an attentive butler with a platter of pleasures, and there’s heat for free on the very air, but it’s in winter that I make my own pleasures and bundle up my own warmth and thrum with compressed energy. Like a daffodil bulb waiting patiently for the light.