A Deep River Year
January 8, 2014

Yesterday was almost as cold as it gets here in Connecticut in the winter.   The Great Plains have been assailed by the same "polar vortex,"  which makes it dangerous just to be alive and outdoors at the same time.    I think about the wild creatures  seeking  some shelter from the wind,  perhaps finding some little warmth in each other to help them survive.    We do not belong in such weather.     We hide in our little homes, relying on the hum of furnaces and the sagging wires that carry electric current from pole to pole through the brutal arctic cold.  We forget how close we are to perishing.

I remember the winter of my senior year at a college in Minnesota, which was perched on a hilltop where the wind raged in below zero temperatures.     My old red Ford sedan spent these winter nights in a flat, exposed parking lot.   For many nights in that most bitterly cold January term I would set my alarm and get up at 2 or 3 in the morning and drive around that quiet little town just so that I could keep that car from freezing over altogether.    Eventually I got the bright idea of disconnecting the battery and bringing it into the dormitory where it spent the night under my bed.   That nice warm battery would be all set to turn over that frozen motor in the morning.

But the true measure of cold, for me, was when, as a boy, I would be outside, playing in the snow until there was no feeling left in my mittened hands.   I would head inside, toss my mittens on the radiator, and run hot water over my hands.    I could barely stand it.    Those cold fingers would ache as the warmth worked its way down toward the bone, then sting as the blood would begin to circulate again.   The windows would be rattling, etched with frost, but my hands around a cup of hot chocolate made the world all right.  This is winter's gift, that we sometimes have the power to make the world habitable for each other in the most intolerable of times.

Cold

This cold
rules over a world
not fit for us.
It bites deep, stings,
hurries us to a place of shelter.
Overhead the trees cry out,
great limbs creaking in the night,
keeping the squirrels awake,
curled up in their open holes
and dreaming of spring.
All are strangers here,
in this alien world
stripped to the bone.
A kind of hunger rises in us,
a longing for another season
that feels more like home.
But here, in this winter exile,
we know the truth:
that we must make our own shelter
to rest, to endure, to grow.
Sometimes it is enough
to warm each others'  hands,
to pull the blankets round,
and then to wait
for something inside us
to burn again.

--Timothy Haut, January 8, 2014