In the stories, the talecrafters associate Winter with death. When we call a person cold we mean blank, emotionless, cruel. When we say a heart is frozen we mean dead, empty, deserted. The Snow Queen covers the land in eternal winter, and everywhere people freeze, shiver, and wilt. The Ice Queen places a frozen shard into the hero’s heart and he cannot touch the world. I don’t know why we associate Winter with death.
When winter is so damn beautiful.
Things don’t die in winter – they sleep. They close their eyes and breath for the first time in three seasons, and stop their wild rampant growing, their desperate coupling, their slow fading. Silence doesn’t mean no one is listening, and solitude doesn’t mean that you’re alone. Hibernation is a sweet soft slumber, a healing thing. In winter we can rest our limbs grown weary from springs revels, from summer’s births.
Oh, endless winter would be cold, it’s true. But can you imagine an endless summer, the scorching heat of the desert? How our skin would crack and peel, how the world could burn in summer. And the muggy wet burgeoning of spring? Endless, eternal growing? The world would fill up, spill over, choke itself and lie gasping. Autumn, now, is a quieter danger. What is autumn, after all, without winter? The march towards a place you never reach; the slow rot that the hard frost never stops; everything muddy, everything putrefied, everything brown and sick and whimpering.
And we forget, don’t we, the warmth of winter! Fingers safe in mittens, roaring bonfires in the snow, cups of hot chocolate in tingling fingers, oh the warmth of winter. Why would we make fire if there was no chill to fight? Winter whiteness only highlights the season’s colours; the bright needles of the evergreen trees, the splashes of crocus in the snow, the perfect blue of the sky just after a storm. White winter paths and flurries in the air, the magic and wonder of winter.
In the stories, we call a person cold and it is a terrible thing. But I am the cold of winter, and there is always a laugh on my lips.
This image comes courtesy of Hayley Mechelle Bouchard. Her work can be found at Little Cat Photography, with more information about Hayley on Our Contributors page.