The deep cold is coming again tonight, just for a couple of ways. It will warm up when Maria and I go to Salem, Mass., this weekend for her birthday. There is a Georgia O’Keefe exhibit at the museum there, a good present for her.

There is a bleak beauty of cold, the winters here can chill the soul and the heart. We are entering the hard month, when the beauty of the winter pasture begins to fade, and the hard work of navigating the ice and cold and snow begin to wear. Older people with money like to go to Florida, but I would not like to do that, I love the aestheticism of winter, the sharp contrast of the seasons.

What  would Spring mean to me without winter, what would the beauty of the deep forest be with the nakedness of the cold time. Here, we all share community, we all share the cold, there is no left and right arguing about what cold is. At the pharmacy we all commiserate, tomorrow it will be very cold again, and Friday as well, then Saturday it will warm.

We all have the sense her of Spring coming, the sun is stronger, the days longer, the sky more beautiful. February is always our time of storms, but they lack the bite of January storms. Spring is just too close.

I loved the bleak sky tonight as the sun sank over the hills, and the mud turned to ice. I would miss the winter if it went away, or if I went away. It feels as if I have accomplished something to get through it.