Mid-Winter

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” (Albert Camus)

If December 21^st is the first day of the Winter Solstice, the exact date of Mid-Winter, this year was February 3, 2023, half-way between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox.  Stopping to note this day is much like my childhood self, plaintively calling from the back seat of our ‘51 Buick ,“Are we there yet?’  My impatience for arrival at a desired destination could be calmed by familiar guideposts along the way.  “We just passed the city limits sign” would suffice.

 In early February, ignoring morning temperatures in the ‘30’s, I seek signs of spring’s arrival.  The trails around the woods are slippery with sodden, decomposing leaves shaken loose from big leaf maples by bitter January winds.  No leaf remains clinging to the tree; the only ones still above my head are cradled in dark cedar broughs.  Death dominates the day from gloomy dawn t0 dusk at 5:00PM.

Because I want to “get there” to spring, I comfort myself with Camus’s often quoted  “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” I make a point of finding life within death in the natural landscape where I am walking.  Decades ago, someone logged the woods where I walk, leaving stumps to die.  But did they die? The stumps continue to decompose from which entwined, serpentine roots of a giant hemlock emerge.   So much for death! Those roots are like a Michelangelo sculpture.  Admiring it, I feel a spring in my step, all the way to the flower border by the greenhouse.  More decomposing leaves and windblown detritus from cedar and pines.  But there, as eagerly  as raised hands, emerge a row of daffodils.  “Oh my!”  I want to worry them back under the leaves, for winter isn’t over yet.  “Don’t jump the gun, young flowers. It is still mid-winter.”  Opposite that flower bed and behind a deer fence is my vegetable garden, frosty and fallow but showing off pink protruding noses of rhubarb.   Spring is undaunted and not far away. We will get there by the signs of the city limits.

And so before returning for morning coffee by the wood stove, I recite Camus’s oft-quoted lines, not only because I spotted OUTSIDE myself the inevitable return of summer in freezing February.  Rather I am engaged with Camus, the man who found WITHIN himself that invincible summer.  Surely, he too could have simply spotted signs of life in death, but he phrases his discovery as one within himself, an act of will.  And it is not just any summer he discovers, but an invincible summer, as if a skirmish had raged before finding summer surviving there on winter’s battleground.  Summer, HIS summer, was invincible.

Here I am marching off to metaphor again, and there is something about my latter years in a world of war and natural disaster when I might be forgiven for raising the white flag of surrender.   But today I find victory in the human will.