romancing winter

on falling in love with a difficult season

winter at home, december 25th 2012

I have always lived in a place with difficult winters.

Growing up, it was Maine, with its towering piles of snow lining the walkway to my front porch, with its grey and churning seas, its roads covered in black ice, its nor’easters. In my memory, I was a perpetually cold child. It felt as if I could never dress properly, that some part of me was always inadequately covered. My tights were never thick enough, my coat never quite effective at blocking out the bitter wind. I existed at home under a constant cover of blankets, in a house that, despite the best efforts of my parents, was still very much a house built in the 1920s, with shuddering windows and walls that you could press your hand against to feel the chill from outside. I hated going out in the waning, blue light of the afternoon to walk my dog, hated having to extract myself from my cocoon of blankets on Christmas morning to go to mass and sit in a cold cathedral on a cold pew. Above all of this, I despised waking up early for school and having to endure what felt like a punishingly frigid morning, suppressing shivers as I got dressed. Winter in Maine is framed as a sort of necessary penance for the beauty of our summers, as if we, as locals, must experience one to truly “earn” the other. It is a very Puritanical way to view the seasons, and utterly unsurprising if you also grew up in New England. Our harsh winters are a badge of honor. If we didn’t have them, we would turn soft, like all those whiners down in Florida. Still, outside of the warm glow of the holidays, when March rolled around and yet another snow storm hit, when spring felt more like a fairy story than a season I ever expected to materialize, I often wondered if this exchange was actually worth it.

Winters in New York City were a different beast entirely, all slate grey and slushy, cold without any of the natural beauty Maine provided. There is, as far as I can discern, no way to dress that both adequately insulates you from the weather outside and that also won’t leave you hopelessly sweaty and over-stimulated on the subway. I grew up going to New York almost exclusively around Christmastime, to visit the American Girl Doll store and drive through my dad’s old neighborhood in Flushing, Queens, where people would put up big, glowing, plastic nativity displays that somehow always, inexplicably included Santa. I saw the big tree at Rockefeller Plaza. I walked along Fifth Avenue, back when the Christmas displays on Fifth Avenue were something to see. By the time I arrived for college, winter in New York had lost its glamorous sheen. I have to imagine that, at some point, I must’ve looked around at Morningside, perhaps near Christmastime, and found the whole thing festive, even beautiful, but for the most part, I kept my head down, seeing very little except the patches of ice dotting the sidewalk that I did my best to avoid. I spent most of my time inside, skittering through the tunnels of Barnard like a mole-person, waiting for spring to arrive and for the city to become tolerable again.

None of this, of course, prepared me for winter in Scotland. Nothing can. If a Maine winter is a slap across the face and a New York winter is a rock in your shoe, winter in Scotland is a sound beating. It grips you by the shoulders and pushes you down into the sort of weather that makes you question why, of all places in the world, you chose to move to a mountainous island on the North Sea. There is no respite. There is no sense of hygge, or any of the other traditions and sensibilities that keep those fuckers in Copenhagen looking so svelte and happy and elegant regardless of the time of year. There is only gritting your teeth and enduring it, with no promise of an idyllic summer at the end of the tunnel to light your way. In fact, there will probably just be cold and more of it. It is cold in your flat. It is cold on the bus and at your job. It is not cold in the pub, which is probably why you spend so much time there. The first winter I experienced in Scotland was only a taste of it, when I lived here back in 2020 on a study abroad that was cut short (can you guess why?). I remember walking up the Royal Mile to meet my friends one night and laughing out loud at how horrendous the weather was, some godforsaken combination of wind and sleet that succeeded in soaking me to the bone while simultaneously trying to knock me flat on my ass. How those months didn’t put me off the concept of Scotland entirely I will never know. In fact, they so thoroughly didn’t put me off that I actually chose to move back here, to experience more Scottish winter. Now, on my third, consecutive Scottish winter, the rain is just as bad, and the wind just as brutal, and the darkness just as complete. And yet now, as I walk across The Meadows, looking up at the sparse trees and the wavering, half-set sun, I find myself struck over and over again by a thought I never imagined would occur to me in the winter, let alone one as desolate as the ones we get in Edinburgh.

God, I think. How lucky am I to experience winter?

Winter Carnival by Andrew Wyeth (1985)

I fell in love with winter the way I imagine most people fall in love with most things: while they’re looking the other way. I put no conscious effort into it. I did not take up cold plunges, or buy a SAD lamp, or write out the phrase “Actually, I love that it’s pitch black at 3:30 in the afternoon” until I started believing it. In fact, in the lead up to this winter, I was bracing myself for it as I always had in the past. Autumn, my favorite season, was waning. The long dark was about to begin. I was scared of feeling listless, or tired, of not wanting to leave my house and socialize, of coming home from work and doing nothing but scrolling for the rest of the night. Winter calls for hibernation, but in the absence of a large, societal shift towards prioritizing rest in these months, the best we can do is pretend that lying horizontally and being on our phones is “rest” when really it’s just more (usually negative) stimulation except we’re horizontal now. Winters in the past have seen me at some particularly low points. Christmas, in the wake of my mother’s death, has not always been a pleasant affair. In February of 2024, I found out I owed the Edinburgh Council no small amount of money. Winter has seen friends leave the city or the country. When something bad happens in the winter, it’s very easy for that bad thing to plunge you further into the pit all that darkness and bad weather has already placed you on the edge of. Even if everything goes smoothly, and your flat has double-glazed windows, and you buy all the vitamin D supplements Holland & Barrett carries, winter is still hard. I sincerely believe that if you go into the season trying to romanticize it, you will find yourself holding onto very little. Winter is challenging, and trying to smooth this fact over with crafting and candles and endless mugs of mulled wine does not negate this so much as obscure it. When the night ends, and you’re back out in the cold, no amount of ignoring the darkness will make it go away. It’s still there, waiting for you.

Therefore, I don’t advocate for romanticizing winter so much as romancing it. If you are ever to learn to love something, you can’t go into it planning to ignore all the ugly parts and loving only what is left over. It is very easy to love winter when it’s December, and the snow is fresh, and the neighborhood is lit up with Christmas trees in every window. It’s much harder in February, when the snow has condensed into piles of muddy ice and you’re starting to forget what the sun looks like, let alone what it feels like on your skin. Surviving winter is not the same as coping with it, and neither of these are the same as loving it. If you are a person who lives in a place with four seasons, you will spend roughly a quarter of your life in winter. That, to me, is far too much time to spend merely surviving. It is also far too much time to spend ignoring the difficulty that the season brings to your doorstep, time and time again. I do not want to enter into a self-care-induced coma, to pretend that everything in my life can be solved with enough supplements and manifestation journals. Winter will arrive regardless, and no matter how much you try to insulate yourself from the outside world, the cold will find a way to seep in. I think it’s in all of our best interests to find a way to embrace this, or better yet, beat it to the punch, and to march outside, arm spread wide, ready to embrace whatever elements might find us.

It perhaps goes without saying that this is easier said than done. Nobody wants things to be hard, and people that pride themselves too excessively on how hard their lives are are usually not the sort of people you want to be around. There is no honor in misery, no piety to be derived from suffering. But in the same way it is impossible to escape every form of bad weather, no matter how we might try to avoid it, there is no such thing as a life entirely free of suffering. We all, to some degree, have difficult lives. Unpaid bills and shitty jobs, deaths and illnesses, breakups and moments of insecurity. I would also wager that each of us, at some point, have probably been quite difficult ourselves. It’s a strange word, one that conjures to mind images of an ornery horse or a child throwing a tantrum on a plane. We do not want to be around difficult people and we ourselves don’t want to be perceived as difficult. Difficult to get along with, difficult to live with, difficult to love. In an ideal world, wouldn’t we all be smooth as river stones, living a life entirely unimpeded by even the smallest bump in the road? A life free of winters?

In one sense, yes, absolutely. Life should not be as hard as it is, particularly when it is by and large a very specific class of very wealthy people making life so hard. But even in a “perfect” world, would difficulties ever truly cease to exist? If the cure for death arrived tomorrow, would you still not be experiencing bad days one thousand years from now? If all you are trying to do is survive until a time free of difficulties arrives, you will be waiting a very, very long time. Even when summer comes and the cold vanishes, another winter is still lurking on the horizon. These things move in cycles. If you only love your life when it is as problem-free as possible, and if you only love yourself when you are at your best, your shiniest, your easiest-to-be-around, you are doing yourself a monumental disservice. It is easy to romanticize your life, to pick out all the parts of it you like best and put them on display. But to romance your life, to take in all the ugly parts of it and love not in spite of, but because of all of these parts, is to develop a different sort of love entirely. A love that can only exist in winter.

Cedar Lane by Linden Frederick (2019)

One of my favorite poems of all time, and certainly the poem I find myself thinking of most often, is Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden. It is a deceptively simple poem, three paragraphs describing the work a father undertakes for his son. Sally Rooney references it early on in her novel Intermezzo.

There is no other season this poem could take place in other than winter. We must see the father’s cracking hands, must understand the meticulous, intentional work it takes to keep a house warm. We must see the son’s indifference here, in the stark, cold light of winter, and not in summer, when it is easier to shrug such things off, when we are kinder and easier to be around, when the world is not so hostile towards us. This is a type of love that only exists in winter. A hard, efficient love. The love of my mother, waking up early every morning to warm up the car and make me a cup of tea, so I wasn’t cold when she drove me to school. Love’s austere and lonely offices. Where else can these exist, if not in the most dire stretches of cold, when we must huddle together, grow practical, cut out the fat and leave only the bones behind? This is no languid, summer love. This is a love that endures. How lucky I was, to experience that sort of love. How lucky I still am, to feel the stark, burning ache of its absence.

I often grapple with the desire to present to the world not only the smoothest, most idealized version of my life, but the smoothest, more perfect version of myself. I do not want to be difficult. Difficult things, in my experience, are often the things people walk away from. And yet, if given the choice, I would never trade my life as it is now for one entirely bereft of difficulties, no matter how horribly some of them hurt. A life free of difficulty would not be a life free of suffering or death. It would merely be a life free of any reaction to these things, a life numbed to any emotion other than placid contentment, a life that only exists in summer. I cannot imagine having grown up in a place that didn’t routinely dump piles of snow on my front yard, snow my dad used to build makeshift forts for me to play in, snow that made the fire he’d light at the end of the day so much sweeter to sit beside. I cannot imagine having attended school somewhere that didn’t have spontaneous snowballs fights on the quad, a place without Christmas trees set up for sale on every city block. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere other than where I am right now, listening to the raging winds battering the windows of my flat, because I know that when I wake up tomorrow, and the world is scrubbed clean again, and the sky is that pure, crystal blue that only arrives in the cold, I will appreciate the beauty all the more. Winter, like life, is full of difficulties. The darkness will come with each setting sun, with each new turn of the year. No matter. All the better to see the light in.

winter at home, december 25th 2012