The Weight of Winter

I keep a wool mitten in the back of my cedar chest, the thumb worn thin from years of gripping a sled rope that has long since rotted away. It is a heavy, stiff thing, smelling faintly of mothballs and the sharp, metallic scent of a season that refuses to stay. When I hold it, I am pulled back to a silence so deep it felt like the world had stopped breathing, a time when the only sound was the crunch of frozen earth beneath heavy boots. We spend our lives trying to build warmth against the inevitable cooling of things, gathering layers of wool and memory to shield us from the quiet. But there is a strange, hollow beauty in the way the cold eventually claims everything, smoothing over the rough edges of our lives until only the stillness remains. Is it the winter that makes us hold on tighter, or is it the fear of what we might find if the snow were to finally melt away?

Tisha Clinkenbeard has captured this quiet endurance in her beautiful image titled Snowy Seat. It reminds me of that same stillness, where a simple place to rest becomes a monument to the passing of time. Does this scene make you want to sit and wait for the thaw, or simply watch the snow fall?