Quote of the Day (Alfred Kazin, on a ‘Gelatinous Muddy Mess’ of Deep Winter)

“Deep winter, yellow sky last night when I went to bed and yellow sky when I woke up. All the streets and skies and buses and people merge into a gelatinous muddy mess. I am depressed by the inability to walk freely—the sky comes down on me from morning on.” —American literary critic and memoirist Alfred Kazin (1915-1998), A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin (1996)

After this week’s blizzard, the roads and side streets are clear by now, but many street crossings are still a mess. You have to step gingerly lest you step into the squishy remnants of the storm. Don’t even think about walking out at night; you can’t discount the dangers of refreezing.

As they used to say on Hill Street Blues: let’s be careful out there.

Photo of the Day: The Calm Before the Snowstorm

Like so many New Jerseyites, I waited patiently for the 12-plus inches of snow from the storm in late January to melt away. In the past week, courtesy of higher temperatures and rain, it finally receded to a more manageable level.

Then came the news that four weeks to the day of that big storm, another, with maybe even more snow and higher winds, was going to hit.

I wasn’t in the best frame of mind, then, when I drove out to Overpeck Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, for the kind of walk I hadn’t been able to take in weeks. Despite large puddles in spots, many other area residents felt similarly and circled the large track on the field.

If anything heartened me as I thought of what was to come within 24 hours (and even as I type this, I can see the flakes following), it was that earlier this winter, the days would have been shorter and I wouldn’t have able to take the attached picture of the glorious late-afternoon sky—and that it might take less time for traces of this latest brutal storm to disappear.

Quote of the Day (Alice Hoffman, on ‘The Weather and Love’)

"When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure."—American novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth (1997)

These matters are, if possible, even more unpredictable this wild winter.

(The image accompanying this post, showing Alice Hoffman at BookExpo in New York City, was taken May 30, 2019 by Rhododendrites.)

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Irish Ice-Cutters in New England Winters)

“A hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and ‘cradle–holes’ were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty–five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss–grown and hoary ruin, built of azure–tinted marble, the abode of Winter, that old man we see in the almanac—his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us. They calculated that not twenty–five per cent of this would reach its destination, and that two or three per cent would be wasted in the cars.” — American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden (1854)

One of those jobs that despised immigrants performed years ago...

The image accompanying this post, showing ice-harvesting in Massachusetts in the early 1850s, appeared first in Gleason's Drawing Room Companion (1852), p. 37.

Quote of the Day (Eudora Welty, on a Teenaged Girl’s Winter ‘Visit of Charity’)

“It was mid-morning—a very cold, bright day. Holding a potted plant before her, a girl of fourteen jumped off the bus in front of the Old Ladies’ Home, on the outskirts of town. She wore a red coat, and her straight yellow hair was hanging down loose from the pointed white cap all the little girls were wearing that year. She stopped for a moment beside one of the prickly dark shrubs with which the city had beautified the Home, and then proceeded slowly toward the building, which was of whitewashed brick and reflected the winter sunlight like a block of ice. As she walked vaguely up the steps she shifted the small pot from hand to hand; then she had to set it down and remove her mittens before she could open the heavy door.

“ ‘“I’m a Campfire Girl. ... I have to pay a visit to some old lady,’ she told the nurse at the desk.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning Southern novelist, short story writer, and photographer Eudora Welty (1909-2001), “A Visit of Charity,” in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1983)

Quote of the Day (Virginia Woolf, on a London Winter in Early Evening)

“The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.” —English novelist-essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” in The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays (1942)

Quote of the Day (Ward Just, on a Brutal Midcentury Chicago Winter)

“The winter of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago. The winter went on and on, blizzard following blizzard, each day gray with a fierce arctic wind. The canyons of the Loop were deserted, empty as any wasteland, the lake an unquiet pile of ice beyond. Trains failed, water pipes cracked, all northern Illinois was locked in, the air as brittle as a razorblade.”—American novelist and journalist Ward Just (1935-2019), An Unfinished Season (2004)

I came across this passage while hearing the news that a winter storm was coming toward the Northeast, where I live. The description was reassuring to me, in the sense that, even with more snow than we have gotten so far this winter, it’s not remotely like what Chicago has received in the past.

According to the National Weather Service, the coldest winter in Chicago history was 1903-04. However, I wonder if Just took a slight bit of proverbial poetic license in setting this in the McCarthy period in the early 1950s, the better to convey a sense of menace? (The lake is “unquiet,” the air like “a razorblade,” and there's that gun carried by the narrator’s father sticking out in the first sentence of the novel.)

(The accompanying image of Ward Just was taken Sept. 5, 2015 by slowking4.)

Quote of the Day (Carl Safina, on February, ‘The Deepest, Sparest Part of Winter’)

“To animals whose food stopped breeding last summer, February makes no promises. For those of us accustomed to supermarket shelves that endlessly get restocked, it may seem like news to remind ourselves that winter is a race against time in a season getting hungrier. February becomes the deepest, sparest part of winter.

“But lengthening days mean the sky is about to draw a deep breath.”—American ecologist, nature writer—and MacArthur “genius” Fellow—Dr. Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World (2011)

I took the accompanying image four years ago this month in Overpeck County Park, a few miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ.

Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on Discovering Happiness Amid Winter)

“They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.” — Pulitzer Prize-winning American fiction writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937), Ethan Frome (1909)

The image accompanying this post shows Ruth Gordon and Raymond Massey as the desperate lovers grabbing for a moment of happiness in a desolate Berkshire village (appropriately named Starkfield) in the 1936 Broadway adaptation of Ethan Frome.

Quote of the Day (Kay Boyle, on a Child Viewing New York on a Cold January Night)

“There is a time of apprehension which begins with the beginning of darkness, and to which only the speech of love can lend security…. It may begin around five o'clock on a winter afternoon when the light outside is dying in the windows. At that hour the New York apartment in which Felicia lived was filled with shadows, and the little girl would wait alone in the living room, looking out at the winter-stripped trees that stood black in the park against the isolated ovals of unclean snow. Now it was January, and the day had been a cold one; the water of the artificial lake was frozen fast, but because of the cold and the coming darkness, the skaters had ceased to move across its surface. The street that lay between the park and the apartment house was wide, and the two- way streams of cars and busses, some with their headlamps already shining, advanced and halted, halted and poured swiftly on to the tempo of the traffic signals' altering lights. The time of apprehension had set in.”—American novelist, short-story writer, poet, educator, and political activist Kay Boyle (1902-1992), “Winter Night,” originally printed in The New Yorker, Jan. 11, 1946, reprinted in Thirty Stories (1957)

I chose this quote for today not only because it relates to this point in the year but also because it combines vivid description of a time and place with compassion for the dilemma facing “little girl”: another night without her divorced mother, who is working constantly to make ends meet.

Within 10 pages, “Winter Night” opens up, as good stories do, to something much larger: a world far beyond that of Manhattanites readjusting to life after WWII.

Kay Boyle had seen much of the worst of the war before America’s entry, as a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker. In this story, she introduced readers—many of whom still knew little about those caught up in the European maelstrom—to the refugees who found themselves on America’s shores.

It’s an imaginative leap into the life of a migrant—a fictional instruction that Americans can use as readily in our time as in Boyle’s.

Chances are, if you’re like me, you may have heard, glancingly, about Boyle without having read any of her nearly fifty books (novels, collections of short fiction, poetry, and non-fiction). 

That enormous output resembles more that of European authors (like Georgy Girl author Margaret Forster, whom I profiled earlier this month in this post) than American ones who labored on only a few books spread out over years or who flamed out after a short but exciting creative spurt.

The “time of apprehension” in the opening paragraph refers to the hour that seven-year-old Felicia waits for her mother in their apartment, fearful of being left alone.

But the “sitting woman” who comes to mind her, it becomes clear, has experienced her own “time of apprehension.” In telling Felicia about another little girl who loved the ballet, the sitter exposes the horror of the Final Solution: fathers gone off to “another place,” remaining family members separated in weekly deportation roundups, constant hunger and lack of necessities, and mothers’ desperate covert messages passed along on trains begging surviving women to look after their children.

Nowhere are the phrases “concentration camp” or “death camp” used, but Boyle’s postwar readers could have easily inferred that was being discussed in the babysitter’s quiet narration.

At the end of the story, Felicia’s mother finds her daughter and the babysitter asleep in each other’s arms. Boyle hints that this is only a temporary remedy for lonely Felicia, who’s enduring a parade of sitters who are “no more than lonely aunts of an evening or two who sometimes returned and sometimes did not,” and for this one, forever traumatized by the horrors she’s witnessed in the war.

Surprisingly, considering Boyle’s considerable body of work, it’s not easy to find any of her books in many libraries. (My local system, covering 77 libraries, contains single copies of only three of her books.) I was only able to find this title in a 1977 Reader’s Digest anthology, Great American Short Stories.

As more writers compete for slots on college curricula, it’s likely to be even harder to locate examples of Boyle’s work—unless feminist scholars succeed in placing her in more American literature courses.  Judging by the skill she displayed in this story, she deserves to be far better known.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on a Pond in Winter)

“Out on the silent pond straightway
The restless ice doth crack,
And pond sprites merry gambols play
Amid the deafening rack.
 
“Eager I hasten to the vale,
As if I heard brave news,
How nature held high festival,
Which it were hard to lose.
 
“I gambol with my neighbor ice,
And sympathizing quake,
As each new crack darts in a trice
Across the gladsome lake.”— American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), “Fair Haven,” in Collected Essays and Poems, edited by Elizabeth Hall Witherell (2001)
 
I took the image accompanying this post during the winter four years ago in Pascack Brook County Park in Bergen County, NJ.

Quote of the Day (Hal Borland, on Why December ‘Is Neither Bleak Nor Colorless’)

“True, December can be raw and cold and its days sometimes are dark, but it is neither bleak nor colorless. Go outdoors soon after sun-up, which now comes late, and even on a lowering day you probably will find a frosty scene of dazzling beauty. If the day is clear it can be a world transformed by frost or snow, newly created, fragile as spun glass, ephemeral as the passing hour.”— American writer, journalist and naturalist Hal Borland (1900-1978), Twelve Moons of the Year, edited by Barbara Dodge Borland (1979)

Though the sun had not yet come up, I awoke this morning to see a thin layer of snow on the ground. Quite a contrast with last winter, when, a local weatherman said last night, snow did not arrive in New York City until February 1.

Let’s see what happens this winter. Unlike when I was a kid, I don’t look forward to snow—I have to shovel it and drive in it, rather than digging out my sled and sliding down a hill in my neighborhood. But I also know that a year with little to no snow in this part of the country is a sign of something wrong.

(I took the image accompanying this post exactly four years ago today, in Overpeck County Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ. That December really was bleak, but for reasons unrelated to the landscape. It was, you might recall, when COVID-19 raged and fear stalked the land.)

Song Lyric of the Day (Barber and Menotti, on Why ‘Must the Winter Come So Soon?’)

“Must the winter come so soon?
Night after night I hear the hungry deer
Wander weeping in the woods
And from his house of brittle bark hoots the frozen owl.”—American composer Samuel Barber (1910-1981), “Must the winter come so soon?”, from the opera Vanessa (1957), with English lyrics by Italian-American librettist Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007)
 
It seems like we were just making the acquaintance of the fall of 2024 when winter began blowing its icy breath on us. A lifelong resident of the Northeast, I expect as much. But this morning, a friend now living in Florida texted me that it was only 35 degrees down there.
 
Well, no bother. I can always wear a heavy sweater and pull a blanket tighter inside when it gets cold. On the other hand, when the temperatures turn subtropical, aside from cranking up the AC and staying indoors, there’s not much you can do on those muggy summer days.
 
For now, anyway, take what comfort you can in the lovely lyrics and music from Barber’s collaboration with Menotti.
 
I took the image accompanying this post, by the way, 14 years ago this month, only a few miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ. It’s easy to imagine both “the hungry deer” that “wander weeping in the woods” evoked by Barber and Menotti, as well as the “hazy shade of winter” that Simon and Garfunkel sang about in the Sixties.

Photo of the Day: End-of-Winter Dreams, Bryant Park, NYC

Late yesterday morning, I was passing Bryant Park when I took the accompanying picture. I was surprised that so many people came out for this ultimate winter scene—we’re still only two-thirds through the season, but it has been so mild (the 3.2 inches of snow that fell in Central Park on Feb. 13 were the most since 2022) that it feels like spring will come early this year.

The organizers of the park’s “Winter Village,” organized by Bank of America, seem to be acknowledging this: Activity on this 17,000- sq. ft. rink will cease after March 3.

With ongoing climate change, the moments when children and their parents can enjoy skating and just hanging out are passing, like the sweet dreams of youth and innocence, always too evanescent.

Quote of the Day (Jack London, on a Man Freezing in the Subzero Yukon)

“Already all feeling had gone from his feet. To build the fire he had been forced to remove his mittens, and the fingers had quickly become numb. His pace of four miles an hour had kept his heart pushing the blood to all parts of his body. But the instant he stopped, the action of the heart slowed down. He now received the full force of the cold. The blood of his body drew back from it. The blood was alive, like the dog. Like the dog, it wanted to hide and seek cover, away from the fearful cold. As long as he walked four miles an hour, the blood rose to the surface. But now it sank down into the lowest depths of his body. His feet and hands were the first to feel its absence. His wet feet froze first. His bare fingers were numb, although they had not yet begun to freeze. Nose and face were already freezing, while the skin of all his body became cold as it lost its blood.” —American fiction writer Jack London (1876-1916), “To Build a Fire” (1908)

The illustration accompanying this post, created by American artist Frank E. Schoonover (1877–1972), appeared in black and white with “To Build a Fire” in the August 1908 issue of Century Magazine.

Quote of the Day (Diablo Cody, on Winter in Minnesota)

“Here in the woebegone upper country, Jack Frost is a liberal, rangy sadist with ice crystals in his soul patch. Winter is the stuff of legend: stillborn, snow-choked, still as the ice floes on the ten thousand–odd lakes. The old mill cities are populated by generations of Scandinavian and German Lutherans, rugged souls hewn of blonde wood, good sense and Christlove. The prevailing gestalt is one of wry survivalist humor and thermal underwear with the pins still in the folds. Everyone's favorite supper is a gluey carbohydrate-rich concoction known simply as ‘hotdish’ and served in a community Pyrex. Minnesota is like a church basement with a leaky popcorn ceiling and a bingo caller who's afraid to amp things up past a whisper.”—Oscar-winning screenwriter, playwright and memoirist Diablo Cody, Candy Girl (2005)

As I look out my window this morning, snow has fallen overnight for the second time in less than a week. But it’s not much and may well melt by day’s end. It’s a far cry from the “woebegone upper country” conjured up by Diablo Cody—for which I am deeply grateful.

Photo of the Day: Dead of Winter

I took the accompanying photo nearly a week ago, while walking on the road past Brookside Cemetery, in my hometown of Englewood, NJ. The snow on the hillside would melt away shortly, the result of rising temperatures and several days of rain.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Walden Pond in Winter)

“Every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more. Standing on the snow–covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet is well as over our heads.” — American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden (1854)

Quote of the Day (Robert Frost, on a ‘Winter Evening Walk’)

“I had for my winter evening walk—
No one at all with whom to talk,
But I had the cottages in a row
Up to their shining eyes in snow.” —American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963), “Good Hours,” in North of Boston (1915)
 
After a couple of inches of snow on Tuesday—and more expected closer to the weekend—my area of the Northeast may see more of the kind of scenes Frost had in mind over a century ago.
 
The only problem: The temperatures (and that pesky wind chill factor!) will be so low that many won’t want to be out, lest they experience frostbite.

Song Lyric of the Day (Joni Mitchell, on a Couple in Winter)

“Now here's a man and a woman sitting on a rock
They're either going to thaw out or freeze
Listen, strains of Benny Goodman
Coming through the snow and the pinewood trees.”—Canadian singer-songwriter—and Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductee—Joni Mitchell, “Hejira,” from her Hejira LP (1976)

(The photo of Ms. Mitchell accompanying this post came from an Asylum Records ad from 1974.)