It’s December and the sky is that comforting shade of heavy but even though mine isn’t the only boiler flue venting steam above the rooftops, I know it’s not really cold enough for snow. I know that, in any event, it is too early for snow. Snow is late Winter. White Christmas dreams come from other traditions, other landscapes. If I had a perfect memory I could count on my fingers how few white Christmases I have seen in my six decades.
I don’t have a perfect memory and right now I’m not sure I can remember any…
…until I remember being on a train going north, being delayed and delayed. I remember the cold and the ice and how good-natured people were being, all things considered. The overcrowding. The tiredness. The wondering whether the presents in cheap gaudy paper would survive long enough to be rejected by the relatives who had more taste, and less joy in their souls.
I want to give you details, so there is a temptation to make them up. The precise time of the afternoon. The way the light was fading. What we could see beyond the grubby windows of a train. Truth is that I can’t even remember the precise nature of the train. I have done that journey so often, and watched the rolling stock improve even as the time-keeping didn’t, but the time-keeping was never really as bad as people said, it was just that we noticed the delays in a way we didn’t register being on time.
I don’t know what I was wearing. If I checked the weather records, I could pinpoint the year, and from that I could reconstruct what it is most likely that I had on to travel. I almost certainly still have it. Perhaps I’m wearing it again, now that I’ve made some progress on the whole weight-shedding
thing. But I would still be, to some extent, making it up.
The thing I remember is the train stopping. Again. It had been a stop-start kind of trip. We were somewhere between Northallerton and Darlington. Maybe this was the year Dad asked me to phone when I got in and then go get a coffee and he’d be there as soon as he could. Phoning would possibly have required coins and a working phone box – or maybe my very first mobile. Or maybe it was a year when he was there early, in the cold of the platform, waiting for me, maybe thinking
about his days on the railway, steaming along the line beyond the walls, the through line, heating Aberdeen smokies on the shovel kept for the purpose. Maybe that was apocryphal. A lie to amuse a gullible daughter. I love the image, regardless.
The train stopped. Maybe someone announced why. Maybe we were still reliant on the passage of the Conductor up and down the train to let us know what was going on. I don’t remember the details.
I remember the snow. I remember the shape of the land, that gentle undulation of north Yorkshire / south Durham. The black snakes of hedgerows and stone walls in this place that had no specific
adherence to the one or the other. Spectral trees. Lit windows. I think I recall an audible collective intake of breath and sigh…we were beyond impatience…and some of us were so close to home and family and Christmas. Some of us were actually smiling at snow. Most of us managed to raise a shrug of the shoulders and a smile for each other. What can you do?
Across the aisle, a young woman, probably about my own age, actually laughed. One of those tension-releasing laughs that has no humour in it but recognises the absurdity of attachment to control. “I wouldn’t mind,” she said, “but I can actually see my house from here.”
There was a time, back in the golden age of crime writing, when that being so, she would have gathered up her belongings, gone to the end of the carriage, opened a door and jumped down onto the tracks. She would have struck out across the fields…and maybe it would have been the beginning of a mysterious disappearance, or maybe she’d have got home safe and had a story to tell. This was not that time. You can’t open the doors yourself anymore. You can’t even open the windows. Perhaps, that year, you still could. I certainly remember hoiking down the windows to open the door from outside, but only once they had been centrally unlocked. So we simply sat and waited until we moved again.
I don’t know what year that was. I don’t even know if the snow lasted through Christmas. It’s just a moment that has stayed with me, for no reason whatsoever.
Mostly, though, we don’t get snow until mid-January or later, well after mid-Winter, as we’re already heading towards Spring. We have a mis-aligned notion of weather and seasons. We think seasons are about weather, when really they’re about light. Hours thereof. They’re about the land and how much work can be (or needs to be) done on it. But mostly about light.
This week we saw the fullness of the Cold Moon. Named by folk who live without our warming Gulf Stream, for whom the white winter, the ice winter, the snow winter will no doubt already have set in. Here it is not yet cold enough for snow. Though I keep looking at the sky hopefully.
~
Cold Moon. I saw it the day prior, approaching the full, in the bright blue of an afternoon sky. It seemed to hang low over the trees. And I was too busy to catch a picture of it. The next day the sky was blanketed and the moon passed through the full unseen.
Not a particularly cold day. Damp and drizzly.
Even so, I am beginning to winter myself. I am beginning to accept that I want to withdraw into the sanctuary, where the lights are low, and the conversations slower. I want to recalibrate.
I am beginning to think about the next year. I want to clean out my burrow. My literal living space and my mental one. There’s an accumulation of clutter in both. So while I am aching for snow and the full moon and a sunrise or two, I know that what I’m saying is that I am wanting to winter. I am wanting the stillness of think-space. I am wanting the clarity of those freezing nights when the ground cracks beneath your feet and the stars are close enough to touch.
When I write that I want more focus, more structure, I realise I am raking over fallen leaves. I have said it so many times and still not yet worked out for myself what it is I really mean.
I remember Satish’s words again: whatever the question is: the answer is simplicity.
Which doesn’t help much. I am surrounded by chores and by writing stimulation and by works-in-progress and by thoughts of all the things I should do and all the ones I want to do and the blurring of boundaries between the two.
Until, later, when I realise the answer really is simplicity. I have been struggling and rummaging and trying to figure out what my focus for next year should / could be. Why not simplicity? What would a year of simplifying look like for me if I really committed to it? What would a year of letting go and letting be give me, and take from me? How would a year of simplicity impact my writing…what would it even mean in my writerly world? In my ordinary everyday world?
The simple answer to that is that I do not know.
Yet.
