How to Love Winter

To fully enjoy this season, we must embrace its subtlety and nuance.

On a crisp, sun-bright morning, wrapped from head to toe in all my warmest wool and down, I step outside. The freshly fallen snow is light and airy and easy to walk through. Without any wind, each imprint of my boot remains intact, a testament to my passage. But mine are not the first to walk these bluffs. The pawprints left by coyotes make perfect, narrow lines through the snow. The squirrels’ tracks are more haphazard and clustered, as you might expect, near the bases of trees. The imprints left by a tiny rodent emerge and disappear into the tufts of dry grass barely peeking through the snowdrifts. Robins and starlings chatter in brush, plucking the shriveled, black buckthorn berries.

The coyote tracks lead across a four-lane road, toward the beach, and I follow, but I lose the trail on the far side. No matter. Today, like every day, the gulls wheel overhead, white as the new snow. Those on the beach are accustomed to and unafraid of people, and they shuffle aside as I pass. Far out, I spy a raft of Goldeneye ducks hundreds strong floating on the surface of the lake.

At the water’s edge, drifts of ice have begun to form and break apart. The chunks roll over one another making a sound that reminds me of shards of broken glass being swept into a dustbin. Further on up the beach, larger ice sheets shift and sway on the surface, bumping into one another, cracking, fracturing. Water gurgles up between the fissures. The sun, glittering off the water, dazzles. With the lines of land docked sailboats ringing like bells in the distance, I realize that winter is as much a musical season as spring, a symphony few dare step outside to hear.

Winter is few people’s favorite season. The early dark, the cold, the ice and snow are challenging conditions to endure, especially for those unfortunate enough to lack housing, heat, warm clothing, and reliable transportation. But for all its challenges, I think winter has earned itself an unfair reputation. Like the gulls and that geese that so many scorn for their fearlessness in a harsh, human-centric world, we have imposed modern values and sensibilities onto a season that is as necessary for the survival of entire ecosystems as it is for individual species and waterways.

Sure, when we decentralize the human perspective, all of nature and our place in it makes a lot more sense. Easier said than done when you’re the one shoveling the driveway before an hour-long commute. However, it is worthwhile to consider how much of our seasonal suffering is self-inflicted.

I live in an apartment where I don’t have to shovel the sidewalks, in a neighborhood where I don’t have to drive to run basic errands—the bank, the grocery store, the hardware store, and dozens of cafes and restaurants are within walking distance. Plenty of folks prefer not to live in urban places, but it makes winter a heck of a lot easier when you don’t have to scrape ice off the car windows and drive through slush, and when the labor of clearing snow is no longer on your shoulders. Because I work from home and make my own schedule, I wake with the sun, even in winter, easing the transition from the warm cocoon of my bed. The absence of trivial daily burdens feels like luxury.

Children know how to enjoy every season; they splash in muddy puddles in spring, they swim and run in summer, make leaf piles to jump in in autumn, and build snow forts and go sledding in winter. When you remove the element of labor and give yourself permission to have fun or, alternatively, to slow down enough to attune your body’s cycles to the season’s, the harsh elements of winter becomes easier to endure. But can we do more than just endure?

No city looks its best in winter, I grant you. To fully appreciate the pleasure of the season, you must look to nature, learn to love its textures, its spare color palette, and its nuance. Winter is a season of contrasts. The whiteness of snow overlaying rough gray bark and dried cattails bent double under its weight. The harsh, choppy darkness of a bay cottoned over by masses of clouds. The stillness versus the storm. Even bundling up to hike through bitter cold, trundling along a windswept coast, only intensifies the pleasure of a warm, hearty meal afterward. A good pair of boots certainly aids in the effort.

Vigorous outdoor activities, like ice skating and cross-country skiing, are popular here in Wisconsin, but I appreciate winter for its subtlety. It’s easy to love a garden bursting with flowers; it takes an artistic eye and someone knowledgeable of earth’s rhythms to know that you must leave the autumn seed heads to feed the birds in winter. People wrongly assume winter to be a dead season when, in fact, it is only subdued. Birdwatching is easier without leaves on the trees to hide them. Discovering the variety of animal life is easier, too, when each one makes an imprint in the snow.

But what about when the thermometer is hovering around zero and the howling wind portends worse? Those of us who are privileged enough to work inside and have nowhere pressing to go might keep in mind winter’s chief lesson: slow down, do less. We humans have blown traditional winter solstice celebrations well out of proportion, ramping up activity and responsibility—from Thanksgiving all the way to New Years—just when the earth is encouraging its creatures to rest under a thick blanket of snow.

Winter is the time we, like all creatures, must rest more, sleep more, eat rich, nourishing foods, and accept that doing less during this quiet season is how nature resets. We, like all mammals, are seasonal beings bound to complex biological and geophysical cycles. Sleep, digestion, and menstruation are responsive to periods of sunlight, the growing cycles of plants, and phases of the moon. We are healthier, and our lives are more enjoyable, when we remember it.