Read by Matilda Longbottom

“Winter is icummen in,” wrote Ezra Pound, in a fit of poetic ill temper. “Loud sing goddam.”

Pound grew up in chilly Idaho, where he presumably picked up his vast distaste for cold weather. At any rate, he spent most of his adult life avoiding it: He hotfooted off to Europe in his early twenties, settled in Sunny Italy, and never wore longjohns or three-buckle Arctics again. He probably acquired a taste for iced lemonade and expensive-looking, year-round tans.

The Pound attitude is shared by many these days, which is why there are so many condos all over the beaches of Florida. I, however, like winter. It’s a peaceful season. The cupboards are full of canned tomatoes and pickles; the woodpile is stacked; and the snow shovel is pleasantly inaccessible, having been left lying in the middle of the backyard in November and never retrieved. It gets dark by five o’clock and after supper there’s nothing much to do but curl up in front of the woodstove in little woolly pajamas and read. Nobody visits. Sometimes the telephone lines fall down.
Viewed objectively-indoors, with a high-efficiency fur­ nace–even the worst aspects of our winters aren’t all that bad. In comparison to some places, in fact, they’re positively cushy.

Take Antarctica. Down at the bottom of the southern hemi­ sphere, Antarctica is the coldest place on earth. Winter tempera­ tures hover around -100°F; winds whip along at 200 miles per hour, and no sun shines for six solid months. The ice, on the average, is 8,000 feet thick. In 1912, Sir Robert Scott froze to death there, along with four companions and a lot of unlucky Shetland ponies. Admiral Byrd, however, claimed to love the place. And for the emperor penguin, winter is the breeding season. It takes all kinds.

Winter, in the garden, is down time. By Halloween, the place looks like no-man’s-land, and nobody is interested in it anymore. The kids joust with the tomato stakes; the dogs, banned from the premises since May, sneak back and gleefully dig holes. My husband and I, with our feet up, hypocritically dis­ cuss the importance of preparing the soil for next season. The garden is over.

Over, but not done with. Winter, in the seasonally intem­ perate temperate zones, does not mean dead, but dormant-as in peacefully sleeping, which is why we have dormitories (full of sleeping students), dormer windows (sticking out of bed­ rooms), and that sluggish dormouse that got stuffed (sleeping) into the teapot at the Mad Hatter’s party. Many plants refuse to flower or fruit without having first passed through a dormant period. Apples, for example, need a long winter’s nap; tulips and daffodils, despite all that blather about the importance of April showers, won’t blossom without a period of undisturbed underground freeze.

Gardeners, too, I suspect, need their down times. Just now, we’re dormant. Snow drifts through the woods, and at night wind howls off the mountains. After Christmas, though, when the seed catalogs arrive, we’ll feel the first stirrings-and by springtime, we’ll be prepared to blossom into the backyard again, grab a gardenfork, and get growing. ❖