For me, the start of winter is an auditory event. It is the silence. The great insect chorus of summer—the cicadas’ electric whine, the crickets’ nightly fiddling—has died. The birds have fled to softer latitudes. What remains is a hollow quiet, broken only by the dry rattle of oak leaves clinging stubbornly to their branches or the distant, lonely sound of a train horn, carried unnaturally far in the dense, cold air.
The start of winter is also a severance. It cuts us off from the frivolity of the other seasons. Autumn’s nostalgia is stripped away by the first hard freeze. Spring’s hope is too distant to imagine. Summer’s hedonism is a ghost. In their place is a stark, honest present. The trees are bare skeletons against a pewter sky. The garden is a flat, brown rectangle. There is nowhere to hide. start of the winter
The start of winter is not an ending. It is a reset. It is nature’s great pause button—a long, dark night of the soul that, if we are wise, we do not fight, but embrace. We light a candle against the gloom. We pull our coats tighter. We exhale, watching our breath turn to visible smoke in the air, and we whisper to the coming cold: I am ready. For me, the start of winter is an auditory event
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