Seasons

Few things are harder to visualize than that a cold, snow-bound landscape, so marrow chillingly quiet and lifeless, will, within three months, be green and lush and warm, quivering with all manner of life, from birds warbling and flying through the trees to swarms of insects hanging in scattered clusters in the air. Nothing in the winter landscape presages the scent of sun-warmed heather and moss, trees bursting with sap and thawed lakes ready for spring and summer, nothing presages the feeling of freedom that can come over you when the only white that can be seen is the clouds gliding across the blue sky above the blue water of the rivers gently flowing down to the sea, the perfect, smooth, cool surface, broken now and then by rocks, rapids, and bathing bodies. It is not there, it does not exist, everything is white and still, and if the silence is broken it is by a cold wind or a lone crow caw-cawing. But it is coming…it is coming…
from My Struggle, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett, page 169.
In the winter I sometimes look back at blog entries from summer and they seem unreal to me. Even opening a jar of tomatoes and releasing their scent doesn’t quite quell my doubts. The winter here is so complete an experience that it is impossible to imagine its opposite. What is most difficult to imagine is that anything will grow again, let alone the vast quantities of food in the garden or the brilliance of the prairie.

It doesn’t work the other way. From summer it is still easy to imagine and believe in winter. The moon, the stars, the cold, hard, uninhabitable vast universe– that is easy to believe. It is always life that is astonishing.

Yesterday I counted a record ten monarchs on a single blazing star plant  (photo from here). The orange flowers on the runner bean plants hold current beauty and future promise.

About 8 p.m. these days the gray-headed coneflowers on the prairie absolutely glow. The sun glows around the edges of cumulous clouds heaped in the Western sky and hits the yellow flowers and purple grasses at a slant, setting them on fire.