Letter To Dad

Dear Dad,

The cold has a spice to it now, even though the days continue unseasonably warm.  The skies blue looks lighter seen through the tree branches; the leaves torn away except for a few stubborn stragglers. The grass is slowly fading with browning bits. Even the red sumac looks burnt to dark red. A lot of the birds are gone. Yesterday, a red woodpeckers was trying my house siding for food until I tapped the window to send it away. The squirrels are sluggish; no startled crawls sideways and up into the trees when I appear.

The neighborhood is mostly quiet with only a few upstairs lit windows on my early morning walk to get the newspaper. I can smell dark and cold and decay. I can feel the land waiting. It's a fanciful thought. But here is another thought from late Fall... We are not coming back from this. We are waiting for white. It's a kind of finality I can live with because there is hope at the end of it.

I don't know if you ever experienced this feeling Dad. This kind of waiting. We have already had the first few flakes but they didn't last more than a few minutes here. Those flakes merely accentuate the feeling of waiting, for winter, for white, for cold, maybe really for change to happen.

I notice the effect of the lessening of light in winter because I find myself stopping, closing my eyes and appreciating the light on my lids. The feeling of sunlight on skin makes me cheerful sometimes, especially in deep Winter. Summer's blast of heat and light doesn't do that.

The sun's force on the snow is powerful though.  The whole experience of breathing the cold air, the deeper blue of the sky, the bright white of sunlight against snow... There is such power in winter's brilliant contrasts; cold, sun, white, blue and even brown. The landscape wakes me up, makes me pay attention. Maybe more so, because of days like today. Maybe, the browning coolness of late Fall sets me up to love winter more.

love
Margot
This letter was published as an essay in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on November 13, 2015