Writers for a Winter Landscape

During a brief, clearminded moment in my couch-sleeping foggyheadedness yesterday afternoon, it dawned on me I could probably open a window. "Take the air," as it were. (I really need to get away from reading Dickens for awhile.) It was 61 degrees out, and even though I'm not done enjoying winter yet, the birdsong that wafted in on the spring-like breeze did my heart some good. And, as always in springtime weather, my mind turned toward landscape writing. Thankfully, winter and landscape prose aren't entirely at odds. A few writers bridge the gap nicely:

Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is an April-time favorite. We always seem to take the road from Blacksburg to Charlottesville in the spring, zooming straight up past Tinker Mountain. But this nature (and many-other-types-of) writer is no stranger to the chillier seasons.

"It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting.

Outside, everything has opened up. Winter clear-cuts and reseeds the easy way. Everywhere paths unclog; . . . The woods are acres of sticks; I could walk to the Gulf of Mexico in a straight line. When the leaves fall the striptease is over; things stand mute and revealed. Everywhere skies extend, vistas deepen, walls become windows, doors open. . . . The mountains' bones poke through, all shoulder and knob and shin. All that summer conceals, winter reveals." ~ from Pilgrim

It gets better. This time four years ago, I was almost engaged to a man from Vermont, and his mother sent me home from my first Christmas visit with Best Person Rural by Noel Perrin. I spent the early January mornings of 2008 at my little Chapel Hill kitchen table, eating fried eggs off Starglow salad plates and reading essays about the small New England town my husband grew up in. So some Januarys, the dark Victorian lit gets set aside and Perrin gets pulled down from the shelf. My goodness, I love him. This is good preparation for the Wendell Berry reading that will creep up insistently whenever the trees start popping out buds come early April. And it's a good way to feel, for a moment, like my Thetford Christmas visit hasn't ended just yet. I know that covered bridge . . .

"Wooden bridge with great curving timbers, old-fashioned sap buckets on the nearby maples (March and April only), well-fenced pasture - this part of the farm has an enormous quaintness quotient. And people often do stop and take pictures. I have nothing against quaintness. In fact I rather like it, as long as it's unselfconscious. But it's not what I love the place for. I love the place we sometimes call Two of Everything farm for about twenty reasons, maybe twenty-five. For example, I dote on the old brick farmhouse - and it's a three-way dote. First, I love the look and feel of the old bricks. They're softer than new bricks, and have a better color. Second, I like it that they are a local product, made in Thetford some time around 1810. Most of all I like it that the house has style. It's a rural adaptation of the urban architecture known as Federal, and it's a delight. My heart does a little skip every time I come in." ~ from "Farewell to a Thetford Farm"

And while it's too soon yet for me to give last January's discovery of cold, Midwestern-mountain-steeped Housekeeping a second reading, I sit in this springish winter weather and look forward to Marilynne Robinson's upcoming essay collection. When I Was a Child I Read Books, to be published round about March of this year. It sounds almost too good to be true. Meanwhile, Robinson does landscape personified. A little bit of Housekeeping's chilly Fingerbone Lake goes a long, wintery way:

"The terrain on which the town itself is built is relatively level, having once belonged to the lake. It seems there was a time when the dimensions of things modified themselves, leaving a number of puzzling margins, as between the mountains as they must have been and the mountains as they are now, or between the lake as it once was and the lake as it is now. Sometimes in the spring the old lake will return. One will open a cellar door to wading boots floating tallowy soles up and planks and buckets bumping at the threshold, the stairway gone from sight after the second step." ~ from Housekeeping