The Winter That Never Ended

Yesterday, I put on my shoes and a jacket and mumbled, "Gotta go outside so I can write about it later." I sat on the garden swing for a half-hour, and a couple of goldfinches fought over the remaining seeds in the feeder on the pussywillow tree.

"What am I going to write about?" I asked them. It seems I've reached that point of the semester when assignments are burdens, books are dead weights with print that bounces off the surface of my memory. Ideas are fleeting.

When we moved in here, the house was on a corner of two roads. About ten years ago, a new (third) road was put in between my house and my neighbors', setting my family's property on a peninsula of grass and giving access to the backhoes that dug up the woods and planted suburban fake-estates in its place.

Behind me, beyond the fence along the new road, the sound of cars blended with the sound of the wind. The gray oily clouds gnashed and whirrled in the sky. Last week, I could hear the grass growing as spring rainwater trickled into the cracks in our clay soil. Yesterday, I just sat there getting cold.

"What am I going to write about?"

I kicked at the mulch under the garden swing and noticed the trees on the hill across the hollow. They're just as stick-y and dark as they've been all winter, but it looked like someone had spilled a little white and a little red on their branches. A little cloud of color. A smudge on my glasses.

The color of spring is yellow. Yellow crocuses, yellow daffodils, yellow buds on the bush by the garden shed that I can't identify. Yellow pollen on the pussywillow, yellow goldfinches.

A few months ago, I dreaded the spring. I couldn't conceive of a bright and cheery season when I was so sad. But I'm sick of being sad. I'm sick of cold winds and heavy skies. I want the weather to pick me up and carry me away from grief.

I left the swing, checked out the baby daffodils behind the garden shed, peeked in on the redbud tree my mom and I planted a couple weeks ago, and returned to the house.

An hour later, it started to snow.


:30°F:
:dark and cloudy sky:

A Couple Images

The wookiee contemplates a monochromatic backyard.


The thermometer convinces us both to wait a few hours before braving the elements.

Finding Colors

My backyard is all a yellowish gray. The garden fence, the frozen blades of grass, the tree trunks and ivy, even the wookiee all blend together like some kind of old faded photograph. It’s obvious it was all vibrant with different hues once upon a time, but now, it’s all one ghastly, sickly shade.

At this point in the winter, my yard is in a state between dormancy and springtime. Now that the snow is gone, will the spring ever come? When I’m outside, I’m surrounded by yellowish gray, and the color brings on a sense of deepest despair.

I shouldn’t say deepest. Deepest despair came over me when musing similarly about color almost four years ago when I found myself visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in Poland. Among the many (many, many) sights that affected me that day was a room full of shoes that had been taken from the prisoners. They were, like shoes from any era, all different colors; if you looked hard enough, you could see a red shoe, a blue one, a yellow one, but their situation in history and my perceptions standing there on some of the most unholy ground on our planet, turned everything the same dull shade of gray.

So today, while I fought off similar, though lighter, feelings toward my backyard, I sought out something—anything—to give me hope. I peeked into the yellowed flowerbed along the driveway. It was covered with yellowish-gray composting grass clippings that my mom spread there last fall to protect the bed from the winter weather. Some grayish sticks of some dead flower huddled together in the shadow of the arbor. But if I just looked closely enough, maybe …

And there it was. A purple crocus just peeking through the yellowed grass. And suddenly, my backyard was no longer a symbol of deepest despair, but instead the first sign of change to a barren and monochromatic world.

:18° F:
:partly cloudy: