The branches of the silver maple outside my window are completely bare now. Where less than a month ago there fluttered beautiful leaves the color of which I can only recall now by looking at photos, there is nothing. Three weeks ago, I couldn't see beyond the tree for the abundance of leaves. Now, I can see all that was hidden behind it. Maybe this is why the starkness of winter is so sobering to me. It reminds me of what it feels like, what it looks like, to shed all outward beauty, all color and opacity and splendor, and just stand, naked and vulnerable and transparent, cold and singular on a hill, exposing everything you've managed to cover for so long--the forgotten kite, the abandoned nest, the broken branches--and slip away into a deep sleep, like a grandmother who has dozed off in front of the tv with her mouth open and her bifocals askew.
But deep season-long sleep is for stately trees, not for common women with families and friends, feasts and fast-food-drive-through lunches, plans and obligations, electric bills and grocery budgets, mice in her fruit cellar and children needing taught. And so the hibernation must take a different form, the nightly kind, with some reading of King Arthur to little girls who are learning to knit and embroider, and some episodes of The Office while snuggled in bed under a big, down blanket, and some blogging with the fierce sound of little mouse-teeth scraping away at something determinedly underneath my big bathtub.
Which means that Spring must come each morning, with a handful of vitamins and a glass of Benefiber, a must-have to-do list, and the sheer will power that keeps one sleep-stiffened foot shuffling in front of the other.
Drawing by Monet
