Mark Twain once quipped that the coldest winter he’d ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. Down here our winter season is often indistinguishable from the other three. But the mean temperature is on the rise everywhere making distant memories of those Chilly Scenes of Winter.
Thankfully, we always have our inscape, that country of the imagination on no map. That is where we can exalt in silent hallelujahs of wonder. From the havoc of painted bulbs in spring dresses we move to Wallace Stevens’ mind of winter conjuring jagged ice on juniper. Only in this inner field can we see nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. From this void we can register the enormous absence of what once was.
In the meantime consider movie terms: that Long, Hot Summer prevails through Summer and Smoke and what remains are Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams. Then there is always the bard reminding us to frolic through A MidSummer Night’s Dream until that Winter of Discontent. We are men and women of all seasons.
We have our dunes and tundra yet our interior landscape is fertile in patches where a blizzard of pear blossoms parodies a snowdrift ahead of the starter’s gun on winter solstice. As we age, we sense the thinning of ice and hear it cracking underfoot. There are plenty of fissures in life as a correlative. Glaciers calve within and without. What once was may no longer be.
We endure our own climate change but that inner spring still sings. Is our gulag inching toward or away from a grove? At the time of equinox our vernal yeast rises in annual insurrection. There are rooms in our mansion still shuttered whose charged air we must release.
Meanwhile in the night sky a comet will streak across the dark. It won’t be Halley's, but Twains will be born everywhere in fathoms of huckleberries. Are we not all fugitives rafting down our Mississippi?
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