What Winter Reveals

One of my favorite things about one of my favorite people is how the Reverend Ellen Cooper-Davis loves winter. When she was new to The Swamp where I once lived, she and I used to commiserate about how we missed seasonal transformations. Well, she missed them, having moved from northern regions. I'd never known them. Until now.

But I knew instinctively, all my life, that seasons are good. I've been a fan of change forever, ya know. My history is peppered with evidence of a continual search for something other than comfort. 

And like a lot of people, I see that my favorite seasons are the ones that conjure up the most change. I suspect everyone likes a little predictable novelty, deep down inside. But it's the deep-down part that's missing for people like me and The RevEllen (as H2 calls her). We don't just want to see the visually lovely variations in color around us, though those do send strong signals to our hippocampi (hippocampuses?). What we dig is the burrowing in, cocooning, hibernating, and yes, death that winter brings.

There she goes again, harpin' on death...
Well, sorry.

But my little chats a couple of years ago with RevEllen were on time and on target, for reasons I'll not expound on here. Yet. She's one of a handful of people in my whole life with whom I felt a solid kinship around this sort of love of winter. I don't think we're different from anybody -- maybe we just like to yammer about stuff that a lot of folks find boring. At any rate, the idea of death as necessary to living is brought home through the season of winter -- out where I live today. Not so much in The Swamp.

The Swamp is always green. Yes, green is pretty. It's my favorite color, in fact. And I grew up in a place with enough mythology that every kid I met who moved there from elsewhere had a lot of expectations, most of which were dashed to the ground by the boring reality of Burb Life. But the green was real. Not just green. Forever green. You fly into The Swamp any time of year and what do you see? I mean besides parking lots and chemical plants. Green. If you're quiet during a jet's descent, you can hear the folks from elsewhere ooohing and ahhing about the green.

My second favorite color is brown. And I get lots of that here in The Sticks this time of year. In fact, everything turned brown back before Thanksgiving. Not just brown, but golden brown. Being a native Swamp Girl, I wouldn't know if this shade is drought brown or winter brown, but I like it. And most of the trees haven't a leaf left. If there's anything that represents seasonal dormancy to me, it's the silhouette of a bare tree against a blue sky. The sun's still there, doing what it does, promising life, and the tree just waits.

Just like RevEllen used to wistfully reflect, going inside is easier with changes like this all around you. Not just going in the house, although that's pretty much a given. But turning my own reflections inward. Winter reflection is absolutely innate.

And yesterday I encountered a bit of tangible evidence of what winter reveals.

I believe I stumbled on a grave in my yard. 

Those who know me well know I was giggling as I brushed the dirt away from what might be a broken headstone. It's at the base of a big, old scrubby tree (I'm waiting for Those Who Know Better to confirm the tree's type, but I'm thinking mesquite) and I originally thought the unusually white, roughly rectangular stone was there to help the leaning trunk. I've seen it before, partly covered by weedy plants, on walks around my property with Burb Dawg. But with winter's cold, there's no more bushy life cluttering the view of what remains, and there's a glint of etching revealed.

Did ya ever stop to think that we're dead a lot longer than we're alive? Kinda funny, especially since we know nothing about that being-dead part of life. I always thought we had scientific efforts pretty backwards. Sorta like those companies with trucks that run around The Swamp spraying chemicals all over the living to keep them green and "alive". So much effort to keep things the same as we know it. Dang, we're a scared bunch, aren't we?

Well. I did bring my potted plants in off the front porch when every single night started dipping below freezing.

I'm gonna ask around about that maybe-grave. And now that the snakes are sleeping, I'm finding other fun stuff out there in the dead brush, too, like ancient bottles and root cellars and another rectangular plot covered with a sheet of metal and small boulders in the yard of my neighbor who lives out of state.

RevEllen would love it out here as much as I do.

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[Jimmy]

I like to call her RevEl. Or lately I have been calling her Lil' Minni.