Anticipations of a Gray Day

And then came the wind and rain and the leaves came tumbling down. The sight of the naked trees ushered in impending winter. Today the yellow leaves thickly covered the sidewalks and street curbs and I replaced my walking shoes with my winter boots. The sky today is deep gray in hue.

I don’t really mind winter though this year I am planning an escape from it for a while to a warmer climate. T.S. Eliot might have though April to be the cruelest month but here in the Upper Midwest it is February that defeats me. Even sitting before the fire I can’t seem to warm up and the darkness overwhelms me. I think of Gordon Bok’s song, “Turning Toward the Morning.” He sings, 

When the darkness falls around you
And the Northwind come to blow,
And you hear him call your name out
As he walks the brittle snow:
That old wind don't mean you trouble,
He don't care or even know,
He's just walking down the darkness
Toward the morning.

Winter mornings are dark and cold, but the coffee is hot and fresh and the aroma of baking bread sweetens the air. I have always liked the morning. Perhaps the necessity of getting to schools early familiarized me to the days early, but as my friend says, morning is the time when I have the most courage. I grow less brave as the day proceeds until finally I pour a scotch and settle in to the evening. Winter affords me the opportunity not to venture too far out except for relatively brief forays to run and to shop and I try to complete those activities early. I have consistently taken my running and now walking out on the roads even in temperatures below zero degrees, but once returned have remained warmly snuggled within with my writing and my books and my home-baked breads. I have always taken naps during the day and winter naps are especially enjoyable. 

            There is all this talk these days about the sentience of trees, and I start to wonder what they think stripped naked and bare. Are they aware that they will remain so for the next six months? As a child I have always ascribed some consciousness to inanimate things, always worried that no pea on the plate wanted to be the last left. Without their leaves do the trees suffer from the cold?

It will be a gray day today and I do not think I will venture too far out. I will light the fire and follow Pip’s understanding of his great expectations. I think I’ll take a nice, long nap and consider a simple dinner and a bottle of beer. There are still a few leaves clinging to their branches: I think of O. Henry’s story “The Last Leaf.” On her sick bed the dying young girl, Johnsy, stares out at the leaves fluttering down from the trees. She sighs and says, "I want to see the last one fall. I'm tired of waiting. I'm tired of thinking. I want to turn loose my hold on everything, and go sailing down, down, just like one of those poor, tired leaves." She intends to die with the fall of the last leaf. But unbeknownst to her the artist Old Behrman had climbed up that tree and painted a beautiful last leaf that does not fall and whose persistence restores Johnsy’s will to live, but as she recovers Old Behrman dies from exposure to the cold he suffered atop the tree painting that last beautiful leaf that did not fall.
           I feel rooted and calmed by those naked trees outside of my window. Regardless of weather conditions though they bend they do not complain. They stand quietly and I think patiently. I have sometimes felt enfolded—somewhat at home in the environment of these trees.