Start Of The Winter Review

Meteorologists will tell you winter begins on the solstice, the shortest day of the year. But those who live close to the earth know better. Winter starts in the margins: in the first frost that turns the pumpkin vines to black lace, or in the moment the sunset shifts from a lingering gold to a hurried violet that vanishes by five o’clock.

The start of winter is also a severance. It cuts us off from the frivolity of the other seasons. Autumn’s nostalgia is stripped away by the first hard freeze. Spring’s hope is too distant to imagine. Summer’s hedonism is a ghost. In their place is a stark, honest present. The trees are bare skeletons against a pewter sky. The garden is a flat, brown rectangle. There is nowhere to hide. start of the winter

There is a ritual to this season’s beginning. We feel it in our bones before we see it in the calendar. The body instinctively slows down. We stop pretending that iced tea and salads are sufficient. Instead, we crave the alchemy of the hearth: the slow braise, the root vegetable, the steam rising from a mug of broth. We pull heavy sweaters from the top shelves, woolen blankets from the cedar chest, as if donning armor for a siege. Meteorologists will tell you winter begins on the

And yet, there is a peculiar peace in this beginning. Winter starts with a closing of the door. It is an invitation to turn inward. The world outside becomes hostile, so we build a smaller, warmer world inside. We read thicker books. We drink darker coffee. We sleep longer. The start of winter is also a severance

For me, the start of winter is an auditory event. It is the silence. The great insect chorus of summer—the cicadas’ electric whine, the crickets’ nightly fiddling—has died. The birds have fled to softer latitudes. What remains is a hollow quiet, broken only by the dry rattle of oak leaves clinging stubbornly to their branches or the distant, lonely sound of a train horn, carried unnaturally far in the dense, cold air.