The First Frosts

When I lived in New York City, on the morning of the first frost, Dave Herman would play Joni Mitchell’s “Urge for Going.” She sings: “I woke up today and found, frost perched on the ground/It hovered in a frozen sky, then it gobbled summer down.” This was a song that was then unavailable on vinyl, and so I would hear it only when Dave Herman would play it, and he played it almost only on the morn of the year’s first frost. When I would hear the notes of Joni Mitchell’s lone guitar on my radio, I would know that not only was summer over, but that the Fall had passed as well, and that the cold, stark winter was upon me. It was time to take out my heavy, wool coat and my lined dungarees, and to make sure I had at least two pairs of gloves. My body shrunk just a bit for warmth.

For the past fifteen years I have lived in Wisconsin, and besides, WNEW-FM is no longer a viable radio station and Dave Herman is no longer playing music there. But the frost was on the ground this week for the first time, and I thought of Joni and Dave and New York. A longing for what? I wondered! Now, I listen to web radio and the winters here are bitter. But I love them nonetheless. I get no urge for going. I am happy out here in my Walden watching not the river flow but the snow fall. Walden will freeze again only to melt apace in the Spring.