A Winter Meditation

Memories of winters past

Winter isn’t so bad when the sun shines. But when the bare limbs of trees are silhouetted against a heavy gray sky for days on end, it’s easy for the heart to sink and stay sunk. Even that might not be so bad if you were in, say, Paris, surrounded by gorgeous buildings every way you look, mile after mile. But most of us aren’t in Paris.

I was fortunate to stay in this gorgeous Parisian building in late October — in an actual Parisian garret. Only in Paris, this wasn’t an unusual building; it was just a building. It’s hard to feel gloomy when surrounded by so much beauty!

Urbana, Illinois, though a pleasant town with lots of trees, had its share of modern American ugliness and only a handful of gorgeous buildings. But you could say my high school was one of the gorgeous ones. You’d be right in saying that. It wouldn’t stand out among the buildings of Paris, but it stood out in Central Illinois. With its dirty beige stone walls, bay windows, rooftop balconies, gargoyles, and greening copper spires, it was a building worthy of Hogwarts. Though Hogwarts hadn’t yet been conceived of when I attended high school.

I was lucky to be there, and I knew it. Although Uni, as it was known, was a public school belonging to the state university, admission required tests, essays, and interviews. I was privileged to attend, and I loved the refuge it provided for weird kids like me with all my heart.

I was also a teenager. A moody, pensive teenager full of the requisite teen angst. A photo I saw recently of my high school — windows dark, roof and bare trees covered in a dusting of snow against one of those omnipresent gray skies — brought that feeling back to me in full force.

Photo by University High School, Urbana, Illinois.

Is it easier to be a happy teenager if you live on a sunny California coast and regularly go to the beach? I can’t answer that, never having been one of those teenagers, but I have my suspicions. I’m quite sure it’s easier to be a happy adult in California than in Central Illinois. At least, it is for me.

You can see the gloom of Illinois winters in two ways.

One: The weight of the heavy clouds in an unremitting gray sky, the cold that constricts your veins, the need to be inside. My high school choir singing “Blow, blow, thou winter wind … thou art not so unkind, as man’s ingratitude” — a tune that 45 years later still fills my head anytime I feel a cold winter wind, though the ones I’m subject to now are nowhere near as cold or strong as the winds on the Illinois prairie. The gray and cold twists your soul into seemingly untangleable knots, drags you down like lead bricks, mires you in a dark pit you can’t see your way out of. You can’t imagine your heart lightening up any more than you can imagine a hot summer day. People seem unreachable. Everything feels hopeless.

Two: There’s a light in our kitchen window I can see when trudging through the snow in Carle Park, which spans the entire block across the street from our house. My mother is in there making dinner, and when I get home I’ll head straight for the kitchen and tell her about my day. The house is warm. The Christmas tree my architect father meticulously picked out — only he would require as sparse a tree as possible, a type that no one else wants and is therefore almost impossible to find — is festooned with white lights, colorful Christmas tree balls, decorations that are hand-picked and in some cases handmade. The house embodies what the Scandinavians call hygge, and it would almost be worth living through a harsh winter to feel it again. Almost.

Both of these ways of seeing gloomy yet cozy Illinois winters are right. Both are true.

But when I see that winter photo of my high school, it’s the first way that takes over my brain and settles there, determined to inhabit my mind and body and not let go. If I have to be gray and gloomy, it seems to say, I’m taking you down with me.

As far away as I am now — or think I am now — from all the teenage feelings, some vestige of them is still deep in there. But not so deep that they aren’t easily evoked.

Maybe they aren’t just teenage feelings. To be fair, who wouldn’t feel some gloom seeing such a dull, gray winter scene? There’s beauty in it, for sure, but it’s a grim beauty. A snowy woodland scene would evoke a lighter sensation, even if a gray sky were involved.

Every now and then I miss the seasons, as I did when I first moved to California. But seeing that photo of my high school reminds me of the reality of harsh winters. I can’t say I miss that.

I started writing this on a plane back from the DC area, where the trees were bare and a December cold snap had settled into my bones. The sun was shining, but the stands of bare trees along the highway on the ride to the airport reminded me of the serious winters of my youth — winters that we don’t have in Oakland.

The next day, I took this photo while sitting in our California backyard:

Today I’m here again, sitting under a lemon tree in 60-degree weather. The fruit trees are blooming all over town, a bit late for these parts but still well within their expected mid-February timeframe.

On Facebook, East Coast and Midwest friends are posting photos of snow, snow, and more snow. I’ve been known to post this map; I admit it, I’m not above gloating.

I know my friends will have the last laugh when our freezing summer arrives here, though they’re probably too nice to laugh about it.

But I’m still glad that for me, those gloomy, endless winters are just a memory.