The Onset of Winter

“before the onset of winter” is a line I wrote about 45 years ago. I can’t recall the rest of the poem, but I have a copy of it somewhere and will likely either find or remember it in the next while. Until then I have just that line and the feeling the line conveys to me, that there is something that sets in every year, some presence or condition or fact, a thing we know as winter. And suddenly this year it seems to be upon us.

November was a great month, mostly bright, mostly mild, and mostly ideal for getting things done outside. But now it’s over. There are no more bright rainbows and no more looking at the previous day’s high and low temperatures on Environment Canada, comparing them with that day’s normals, and smiling that small smug smile that says, Hey, it’s November and we’re not doing badly at all. Now it’s December, and those outside chores, like leveling out more of the dirt pile from the walkway, finishing some last bits of painting, and getting a few more bulbs into the ground, may not get done before the onset of winter, because the onset has begun.

Yesterday I dumped out the wheelbarrow that still held the accumulation from Saturday night’s storm and got a large slosh of water and a pan of ice a couple of centimetres thick that broke neatly on the hard ground. I did plant some squills and grape hyacinth in the black dirt under the pine needles, because it was still soft there, and moved quite a few loads of soil to fill some low spots once I’d broken the frozen crust on the pile, but my look at the forecast showed only one day this week with a high about zero (Thursday morning it’s supposed to be raining and nine degrees) so there were limits to what I could achieve. I knew that the season was changing and my time was limited.

This morning as I walked up the lane to the bus I saw a thin skim of ice on the pond and some small icicles in the brook runoff. It wasn’t really cold, maybe minus six, and I thought of how pleasant winter could be, especially if it was as gentle as this and I had my down jacket on. Almost everyone who got on the bus was bundled up, most wore tuques or hats, and the bus heater seemed to be on full blast. It was an onset of winter morning.

When we drove out around Bedford this afternoon, I realized that Saturday night had brought them a lot more snow than we got down by the harbour. Although we had a few skiffs of white here and there, the clearest sign of winter for us was the crystalline texture of some of the soil I had used for the garden space next to the walk and the fact that the large flowerpots were frozen solid, but out along the highway the spruce trees were still loaded with snow three days after the storm and at Bayers Lake there were huge piles at the edges of all the parking lots.

It is still a couple of weeks until the solstice and the official onset, but something has changed in the season. That something is upon us, and its name, I think, is winter.