Tuesday in December
The first Tuesday in the first month of winter is demonstrably cold.
Patrons arrive at Starbucks with heavy coats, collars turned up. The wind races from the north, some gusts at 30 mph under a gray lowering sky. The temperature is in the low thirties. This feels much colder since — until now, I’ve lived on the other side of the seasons fold point. Fall is a convivial experience esthetically, existentially. One absorbs the glow of sun and emerging colors, then the withdrawing of life, shedding leaves, waving tall-grasses, seed heads heavy.
Winter is the austere season. One must learn to hunker down, observe, reflect, wait.
2 thoughts on “Tuesday in December”
Winter has always been a metaphor as well as a season. Sometimes it is meant as old age, or, as the Bard said, the winter of our discontent. So metaphorically perhaps we are in deep within our nation’s winter, our culture and way of life frozen with no spring in sight. Each day more leaves of sanity are swept away by the cold wind of nationalism, xenophobia and hatred. Just as with the season of winter, the sense of a warmer and, in this case, saner spring seems out of reach; so far in the distance we have a difficult time visualizing recovery from this episode. I wish I could predict if this era is just a passing season or something darker. The cloud of Mordor without a hobbit to save us. I wish I knew.
A Hobbit is exactly what we need to make the difference. Perhaps a Hobbit is approaching Mordor… Too early to tell. Waiting is hard. And does Frodo know that he is to become Frodo?