This is one of those northern New England days when it 's hard to believe the sun is shining anywhere. At 7:30 the sun has not shown its face yet. The steady drizzle and low hanging clouds make my headlights necessary, but the lights do little to illuminate the scene. The lovely yellow and red leaves that carpeted the ground the last few weeks have turned brown and slick and heavy in the rain. I try to remember the hot sun of my last two years living in the tropics, but it seems more like a different planet than a different hemisphere. I feel sure the sun is not shining anywhere real this morning.
We have entered the refrigerator season in our house. I have an unheated pantry off my kitchen in our 1796 colonial house. In the summer I use it for canned goods and baking supplies, but in the spring and fall it doubles as a cooler. Extra jugs of milk, blocks of cheese, eggs and even leftovers from dinner share the shelves with soup and crackers. Already, however, I need to remember not to leave anything that might be damaged by freezing in there; we have already had two heavy frosts and it's only a matter of days till the pantry becomes a deepfreeze overnight.
My seven year old became accustomed to the unchanging rhythm of life on the equator and is confused by the dark mornings and darker evenings. As each day starts later and ends earlier than the last she is never sure of the time. She arrives downstairs in the morning with her thoughts as tangled as her hair. "Is it really early? Should I go back to bed?" And on the other end of the day she wonders, "Why are we eating so late?" when she looks up from her play to see that the sun is gone.
I vividly remember the first year we lived this far north. This was our dream house, our dream place where we would raise our brood of children in pastoral bliss, with a huge maple in front of the ancient homestead, the sound of a waterfall just outside the kitchen door. We moved in during the deceptively lovely first week of October. The sun was shining, the trees were still hung with brightly colored leaves, the nights were crisp, but not unnaturally long.
By November first, nearly half our waking hours were spent in darkness. I drove dark, winding country roads, still unfamiliar to me, to do my grocery shopping in the middle of the night, leaving my husband to clear off the dinner table from what had begun as an early dinner, but must have gotten caught in some kind of timewarp and ended at what was surely midnight. I remember pushing my cart through the fluorescent light of the market, fighting the nausea of an early pregnancy, and emerging into the cold, dark of winter come too early.
I learned in subsequent years to welcome the early dark, to enjoy gathering my family together in the circle of light that was our kitchen table, eating comforting winter foods and warming our hands with mugs of coffee or cocoa afterwards. I learned to find pleasure in the way my body gradually warmed to the task of a brisk walk on a biting cold day, eventually breaking a sweat under the many layers I peeled off one by one. I remembered from my own childhood the smell of wet wool after sledding and came to tolerate, at least, the mountains of wet coats and mittens and scarves and boots that dominated my kitchen for three or four months. I grew to really love the darkest time of the year right around Christmas, when the lights of the tree made the darkness feel like a blanket around our family, drawing us together in a warm, bright corner of the deep, dark universe.
I need to learn those things again this year, to treat my sojourn here like a long marriage, reminding myself of the things that drew me here in the first place, what I found enchanting and endearing when we were new to each other, this place and I. I suspect it may take some work, some intention on my part, but I'm willing to try. Bring on the snow. . . . just not quite yet.
