The Joys of Winter
Katie Marquette on the magic of the snow and cold
This year winter has been a bit… absent. The usually cold and snowy days of January and February have been replaced with a perpetual dreary, muddy, and surprisingly warm April feel. And while for many, this is a welcome reprieve from the harshness of a typical Minnesota winter, there is something magical about a cold and snowy winter that I’ve been really missing.
Katie Marquette writes in her article, Learning from the cold:
“Life is all about the balance of extremes, of the promise of reprieve. I’ve tried to explain this to friends less enthused about the cold - how much of my love of the cold is tied up in my love of blankets and books and a warm fire. How to love these things I need to first be a bit uncomfortable, a bit raw and challenged. How I need to long for something and hope for something again. How the cold asks me to do all these things.
In the midst of heating bills and cars slow to start and broken tractors and too much to do to deal with a snow day, I hope I don’t forget the beauty and hope of winter.
There will always be something magic in waking up to a world of white - how what was yesterday brown and dead and grey is now shining, glimmering, fresh and clean.
What a promise that is.”
We got our first snow in months on Wednesday, and after seeing the same mud and dirt and dead grass out our windows for weeks, it was nothing short of magical to wake up in the morning and see everything covered in white. The children were eager to get outside and play, to build snowmen and go sledding and make snow angels. The sheer delight that comes from fresh fallen snow is easy to forget as an adult faced with the tasks of shoveling and scraping off cars and bundling everyone up. But without those extra challenges, the season loses its excitement and its beauty.
Katie Marquette reminds us in the opening of her article that Lucy and our first entrance into the world of Narnia is marked and made magical by the presence of snow:
“C.S. Lewis immediately marks this strange place, this new place, as magical, by covering Narnia in snow. A single burning lamppost, a warm ember amidst a wood of green and white and grey, promises respite, reprieve, and moments later the charming (and guilty)1 Mr. Tumnus will invite Lucy back for tea and cakes and conversation by the fire.
Narnia may have been blanketed in cold by the icy heart of the White Witch, but the warmth of Mr. And Mrs. Beaver’s kindness, their kitchen piled high with food and drink and good company, glows all the more in comparison. Indeed, the cold offers our heroes opportunities for great fortitude and heroism, trudging out into the icy night to flee the murderous wolf police. And when the snow does finally melt, when the first thaw cracks ice sheets across the river, we are yet again confronted with the inherent magic and danger and majesty of the natural world. Both beautiful and horrifying, strange and familiar, the initial foray into Narnia’s Winter has taught us to long for Spring.”
You can read the whole lovely ode to winter and snow here. Here’s hoping the snow will stick around and a few more snowfalls will arrive before Spring officially reaches us.