Musings About Winter

The strange thing about winter is that it’s often a black and white world. It’s like living in a black and white movie. Take a photo of the outdoors with snow on the ground. Oh, the picture will have its shades of gray, but not much more. 

The green grass and blue sky of summer will not be there. Summer transitions into fall, and trees glow with fiery shades of red and orange and yellow. Then as autumn transitions into winter, the beautiful leaves of autumn fade into a dull brown and fall to the ground to litter streets and gutters and yards. The beautiful trees of autumn now appear lifeless, with their dark, naked limbs appearing stark against an often somber backdrop of gray sky. These are color photos, but you would hardly know it by looking at them.

The atmosphere is oppressive. No one really wants to go outside; it’s too cold, too uncomfortable, too dreary. We go outside in order to get to the next indoor destination we want to be. We go from indoors to indoors, with a short interlude outdoors. There will be no dalliance in the winter world, no pausing to admire its beauty.

And we dream about spring, when at last we can open the windows and welcome inside the outdoor air with its scent of spring, and see wildflowers blooming, and watch the trees turn green again, and the skies blue.

In his sonnet “Work Without Hope” Samuel Coleridge wrote:

And WINTER, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!

Mother Nature is beautiful, but without winter, would we appreciate her beauty as much?