IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER

THOUGHTS ON A FROSTY DAY/

       

Marie Dominique offered me a new winter coat for my birthday (“…and Christmas,” she said, frowning at the price tag on the one I chose, “and New Year’s, and Easter….”) My closet already holds a midnight-blue Armani and a ground-sweeping grey Agnes B but they’re what used to be called Sunday-Go-To-Meeting coats.  Though it is a Bugatti, no fripperies accompany the new one, an efficient blue/grey item, down-filled, with a zip-up inner lining and pockets deep enough for hands in gloves. In it, I’m ready for whatever winter can conjure up.

            Not that winter holds any particular fears. Born in heat, I always felt the allure of its other face. One of Robert Heinlein better novels takes its title from a cat (called Petronius Arbiter) that declines to accept snow and so prowls the house, looking for an exit that opens onto warmer weather - the door into summer.

I had summer. Too much of it. What I wanted was cold.  

Well, beware what you wish for. Our home in rural England provided cold, and in quantity. Fishpond Cottage, Cemetery Lane, East Bergholt, as chilly as its name suggests, sat in a declevity widely recognized as the iciest frost spot in the county. Water froze on the bedside table and we took to scouring the woods for dead branches, building a roaring conflagration and sleeping on the floor with our heads in the fireplace.

   French cold demanded an even more radical adjustment. Arriving from Los Angeles in what passed in California for winter gear  – a scarf and an optimistic attitude – I found Paris ominously ombrous, wreathed in a mist clammy with pathogens, to one of which I immediately succumbed. Had I not done so, however, I might have recoiled from this alarming new environment and fled back across the Atlantic. A dose of that flu the French call la grippe immobilised me until I could experience Christmas with my new family and start to appreciate l’hiver.

            But now our daughter, raised in the bracingly chill environment of France,  has decided to move to Australia. She posts pictures of herself beaming in the sun, surrounded by frangipani, attentive to the squawks and cackling of galahs and kookaburras – as close as you’ll get to the “indignant desert birds” of W.B. Yeats.

Frankly, I’m aghast.

            What can she be thinking, to sell out to sunshine?

            There’s comfort in cold: none in heat. Heat rots: cold preserves. Cold has a nobility that heat never achieves. Heat finds an excuse but cold is inexorable. Entropy will always win.

Robert Frost, a connoisseur of winter,  at home among leafless woods and icy stones, had it right.

Some say the world will end in fire.

Some say in ice,

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

At my age, one tries not to dwell too much on death but if I visualize a preferred demise it’s in terms of another flinty New Englander, Emily Dickinson.

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –

First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

…but don’t mind me. I get this way around the holidays. And listen…. have you seen my new coat?