Can I still love winter?
When the best of autumn—red leaves, purple asters, brilliant goldenrod—finally gives way to snowfall and freezing temperatures, I embrace my identity as a winter person.
My love for this season of cold dates to my childhood in the Midwest. Looking back, it’s probably the fun side — sledding, snow forts, hot chocolate — that affected me most. Still, I was raised to cope with the conditions. I learned to drive in snow. I knew how to dress to keep warm. I had a mother who noticed the beauty of a cardinal on a snowy tree and asked me to stop to take it in.
As a young couple settling in New York for graduate school and ultimately for our careers, my husband and I always spent time outdoors. Most significantly, we became cross-country skiers. The first property we ever owned was a rustic cabin in the Adirondacks. That we and our very young children went to the cabin in winter—a place heated only with wood, where we skied in and skied out— astonishes me. Yet those experiences were formative, especially for our daughters.
This continued in the early years of our Vermont retirement. By then, we were both confirmed winter people, relying on wood for heat and bundling up on frigid mornings at least for a dog walk. We still cross-country skied frequently and with enthusiasm. The warming cabin at the high point of the Trapp Family Lodge trails was always within our reach. We often shared these activities with the children and grandchildren who had lured us away from New York and to Vermont in the first place. Their living here was our good fortune.
But with time’s passing, what I value during the cold season is changing, of necessity. We are reluctantly wiser, and, yes, nostalgic for the former intensity of our enjoyment of the outdoors. The risks of injured knees are real. An ungraceful fall several years ago on the ski trails at Shelburne Farms brought me up short. By now, we’ve given our skis away, but our snowshoes hang in the garage, should we want them.
We are regrouping. My husband no longer clears our walks with a snowblower, but he takes great satisfaction, oddly, in being the first in the neighborhood out to shovel when we’ve had a storm. He is happier than ever to have a wooden Liberty puzzle in progress on a card table in the living room.
I too am reorienting, trusting that with adjustments, I will continue to appreciate winter. Now, I have the gift of time. I come inside, where I am engaged with books, a recorder group, and even occasional cribbage games with my husband.
The best of my current indoor occupations, however, is my newly discovered passion for weaving. I have admired weaving and weavers forever. The wool, the patterns, the warmth give me pleasure. In Maine this past summer I volunteered in a local horticultural therapy program where we wove with plants. Imagine a “loom” four feet by eight feet, made from sturdy twigs secured at the corners with screws, and warped (the term for securing the vertical threads) with twine. I helped participants select from a garden the long stems of herbs and other appropriate choices, to weave them into the twine warp of the loom. As the afternoon session sped on, our earthy creation turned magically into art. I was inspired, and determined to bring weaving more fully into my life.
And now I have begun. Not really knowing what lay ahead, I took a chance on “Weaving Your Story” at the Shelburne Craft School. The registration fee included a wooden frame loom, a “shed stick,” several wooden needles for taking yarns back and forth through the warp, and as many skeins as I needed from the overflowing baskets of yarn at the school. The instructor was friendly, nurturing, encouraging.
The goal of “Weaving Your Story” was to offer new weavers opportunities to experiment. We were urged to start with whatever idea presented itself. Having always followed directions—in knitting, quilting, and needlepoint—I was uncertain. Yet, as I drew my “map” with the colored pencils provided, an image emerged, one I would not have expected here in Vermont. It was of a mesmerizing scene from Maine, where every August I gather with family on the porch of our beloved log cabin overlooking Linekin Bay. It centers on the single night of that month when the full Sturgeon Moon rises from the east over the bay, and we come to the porch to take in its exquisite radiance. Once that vivid picture was in my notebook, in its roughest form, I was joyfully committed to figuring out how to weave it.
I warped my loom with strong grey threads and began at the bottom. With darker yarns I wove the rocky shore, moved on to mixed blues for the ocean, and to the greens and browns of a small island. Those colors yielded ultimately to a star-studded night sky (with the help of French knots) and a brilliant orange moon whose beams illuminated the waters below, closest to the shore.
Having nearly finished my initial project, I am hopeful that going forward, weaving will be both affirming and transforming. With a loom as my focus now, I can still love winter, but differently, trading movement on skies for travel in the realm of imagination.
My next class at the Shelburne Craft School, “Introduction to Tapestry Weaving,” begins in March.