Commentary –

Winter Is A Season Of Contrasts

By Jeff White

Inching along behind that overly cautious car on Boggs Hill Road or Queen Street or Wasserman Way during this week’s snowstorm, it was easy to seethe over the ugliness and hassle of winter. Yet with all the treacherous roads and store closings that put wrinkles in our daily routines, it was hard not to marvel at how winter can elucidate such sharp contrasts in our lives.

Is there another season that makes us pay such close attention to contrasts?

In autumn, one week might showcase a spectrum of color in the canopies of Newtown’s trees, and then the next week those same trees can be as bare as skeletons. Spring begins with these same bare twigs defiantly staring down the warming sun, only to sprout new buds that reclaim the tree. Bright, sunny summer days can yield thick charcoal clouds that swell and dump rain.

But for the most part, these changes are isolated, or gradual, often occurring over the course of days and weeks, unobserved in our daily lives. We just wake up one day, and comment to our friends that it looks like the trees are starting to bloom.

But not during winter.

Consider the sharp contrasts of warmth and cold we experience countless times each day. Is there a better feeling than succumbing to winter’s arctic chill, only to sprint back to a warm car or cozy home, where you can almost feel your skin’s frost spill across your floor?

Then there is the way that winter can transform sound. We are all accustomed to the noises of our neighborhoods, the rustles in our backwoods, the sounds of distant cars winding down roads. But if you poked your head outside this Tuesday morning, as a fresh blanket of snow began to mat the ground, you no doubt thought about how quiet it was. A new snowfall can turn everyday sound into an almost piercing quiet, so quiet at times that on some early mornings the only sound you can hear is your own breath dispersing through the air.

Consider the change of a lake, from liquid to solid, not an easy accomplishment for sure. Or how an undulating, brown-hued landscape can turn into a sea of white.

Of course these are nice changes, scenic changes, comfortable changes, and we like them. But there is a flip side to that warm-refuge coin: cozy and content under our blankets each morning, an alarm clock pulls us out of our beds and we shiver to the shower. The quiet of a winter’s morning is soon overcome by the scrapping of street plows. Virgin snow quickly becomes flecked with mud and sand thrown up from the street by inching cars.

Still, we always seem to notice these changes. We might relish the peace that a snowfall brings or complain about how street sand stains our khaki pants. But nonetheless, we notice.

To be aware of these contrasts of course is to be aware of how it is the natural tendency for things to change. Some changes are inevitable: the growth of a child, the advancement of technology, the increasing of taxes. Other changes need a gentle shove – say from Mother Nature.

And as the Good Lady pushed her way into our lives this week, many of us were reminded about perhaps the greatest contrast winter offers. In this bustling, boisterous world, winter has the ability to make things simple. When the snow comes, families and friends are flushed outside. Ponds become manic, hills become tracked from the keels of colorful sleds. Siblings wrestle in front yards, and mothers tighten the laces of their children’s skates.

Laughter might break winter’s silence, but it can also drown out snowplows.

Winter reminds us that our lives are all vulnerable to change, prone to move from complexity to simplicity—especially if we allow it.

That’s not such an inconvenience.