I resist Winter. Weeks into the season I am still not wearing socks. I scoff at scarves and hats. I am stubbornly cutting greens and tossing salad instead of roasting the pants off root vegetables. My internal clock runs slow. There is a reason my totem creature is a snail.Yet the day comes. And one day well into the season I wake up to the idea of soup and socks and late sleeping. Once I have made up my mind to it there is nothing to fear of cold but cold itself and lots to do to stave it off.
Winter has a brace of good things about it. Let me remember them:
Low sun which is sweet to the skin and kind to the eyes
Knitting - cold weather makes clicking the sticks together less prickly and itchy
Board games - captive lunch guests are too polite to refuse Scrabble, Mysteries of Old Peking, Scotland Yard or jigsaws. Actually they are not invited to mull over jigsaws but often they will stop in front of a table with the pieces sorted patiently into colours and try their hand. It is a blow when savant-like they drop in a piece. They cannot resist a smile.
Fires - both in the hearth and in the early outside darkness
French onion soups with a splash of brandy thrown in as the onions sweeten slowly
Make that all soups
Good clear cold nights for looking at stars
Etegami club and receiving mail from the opposite season
Sunday roasts with Yorkshire puddings and crabapple jelly
Cocoa and hot water bottles taken to bed
Working in bed
Dogs on the bed
Winter quilts on the bed
Dark skies
Beachcombing - storms throw up good shells
Late quinces
Pies - savoury and sweet and all shapes - galettes, potted, flans, freeform. I love them all in all their variety
Introspection. Of the good sort
Planning the Spring vege patches
Wearing woolly jerseys and tights
Slow cooking
Seeing dogs out and about sporting hand knit jumpers and coats
Moss, lichen and mushrooms
Chimney smoke and the smell of it
Visiting the Botanical Gardens hot houses or the butterfly avary at the Zoo
Imagining flying north like a bird
Actually I love Winter.
