The author, with his son, sledding on what appears to be a half-inch of snow.
In the not-too-distant past, though going back much longer, I, like many, had difficulty enduring winter in the Midwest. Whether it was seasonal affectiveness, cold-nights melancholia, or simple winter restlessness, January and February proved menacing. Up through college, I played either basketball and/or baseball in whatever gymnasiums I was then tied to, and so I kept busy and didn’t have the time to consider the season for what it was—or wasn’t. But then all that ended and I settled into a working life.
I recall a beloved professor telling the class he was grateful to live in a place with all four seasons. I nodded, respectfully and mechanically, and didn’t give it much thought for several years, until that working life settled in and I questioned the statement’s validity; it didn’t seem to hold.
Who would want to live in northeastern Indiana with our puny, fake winters? Either dump loads of snow or stay in the 40s and 50s, an English winter, good hiking weather. (There were a couple of years where we had enough snow to cross-country ski, but that hasn’t been the case for a while: except for a cold spell or two, it’s mostly cold and brown and dead.)
I detested the season and was at a loss for what to do. That is until I stumbled on a new-to-me concept (and one that had seemingly peaked in the States several years before I found it).
Hygge.
Pronounced hoo-ga.
As many of you may already know, hygge is a Danish concept that celebrates what we might go ahead and call “cozy”: candles and fires, thick clothes and blankets, hearty food and dear friends, warm drinks and conversations. Hygge embraces the belief that even when it’s the darkest and coldest, there can be genuine warmth and light to our lives.
The book I’ve used is a beautiful little thing by Louisa Thomsen Brits called The Book of Hygge. I don’t remember how I came to it, possibly via the “commonly bought together” suggestions when I was reading Nordic books about getting your kids outside, regardless of weather. I had a spell with such books.
And so I’ve come to embrace the slowness of post-holiday. The last few weeks of December can be downright magical, but they can also be stressful. But then we pass beyond the new year and things slow down.
My kids, though pretty good about playing, still get restless, and are always hungry, and the dog barks much too often at passersby, and the constant cold can be warying, especially if it accompanies several cloudy days strung together.
But we are fortunate to have a delicious hearth, a large picture window, comfortable chairs. What else could I want other than to curl up with a warm drink, the only thing on the schedule a book in hand, some writing, my lovely wife nearby, the chatter of kids one room over. No grass to be moved, no weeds to be pulled, no cross-country meets or soccer practices, just a big 19th-century novel and a fireplace.
I’m coming over to this centuries-old Danish way of spending the season.
Miscellany
Speaking of those massive, 19th-century novels, now is the time to dive in. I’ve returned to George Eliot’s Middlemarch. A re-read (which if you’ve been following know I love a re-read) but it’s been twenty years, and though I remember enjoying it, I’ve already discovered countless items I missed, or don’t remember, or just wasn’t ready for. Tis the season to dive into an ambitious read, one you might not stick with at other times of the year.
Not the edition the author owns but he likes the cover. “Mine is an old, used, Norton Critical with a rather drab and stodgy cover, very little inkling to the slight gems and subtle magic contained within,” he said.
A favorite essay of mine from last winter was re-published, and I was grateful to stumble on it again. Mary Pipher’s piece in the Times “Finding Light in Winter” is a beautiful meditation on overcoming, or at least making the best of, this dark and cold season. A beautiful read. And I love the Monet painting used with it. I could look at that all winter and have my mood lifted daily.
Claude Monet, “Snow in Argenteuil” (1875)
And I’m thinking of Los Angeles. The devastation has been heartbreaking; the pictures and videos of entire neighborhoods flattened and smoldering, of feeling there is little to do to stop the impending march of flames.
My nostalgia and longing for L.A. goes back to the summer of 2008. I was there with a teaching program and we were training and teaching summer school for the city while living at Loyola Marymount. One of the most formative experiences of my life, with some of the best people I’ve been privileged to know, including three great roommates and someone who would become a dear colleague and friend. It was my first time in California and I thought it possibly the most magical and mesmerizing and beautiful place I’d ever been. Those there with me who had spent time in Northern California thought I was crazy, for being so taken and awed by L.A. Yet all I could think was how it was the real thing: what the shows and movies and clothing stores and advertisements had made it out to be, and so much more.
I couldn’t get over the weather—cool mornings and evenings, the fog drifting in, hot afternoons lacking the humidity and bugs of the Midwest—or the setting, especially from up on the bluff on which the university was perched. In the evening I would sit on a bench near the bluff’s edge. If I looked left, there it was, the Pacific, mighty and bawling though seemingly calm from where I sat. Straight ahead and to the right were the lighted ziggurats of downtown. Farther right and beyond were the San Gabriel Mountains. I could see all this with just the turn of my head. Five weeks I was there and I never tired of it. And then Cassie came out to visit and we went to Santa Monica and swam in the cold Pacific, and our rental car had GPS and we punched in the addresses we’d always heard of but had never seen and drove all through L.A. I hope I’ll never forget those days.
Thinking of it all makes me want to get back, of course, but mostly I’m just hoping those displaced and hurting will get some semblance of their lives back, soon, soon, and hopefully much more.