Nancy Price GraffWinter is the season of my discontent. Sometimes the light can be as sharp as a splinter, sometimes as luminous as an opal, but there is never enough of it.
The days, already filled with the regular chores of life, are now burdened with the extra demands of winter, toting wood, sweeping, and shoveling. They are too short and there are too many of them.
The air slaps me in the face when I leave the house. Outside, my lungs burn and struggle to fill, as if oxygen itself were being rationed. Granted, the landscape can be stunning in its spare beauty. But the cold, for me, as I have aged, has become a plague.
It wasn’t always this way. When I was younger and had children at home, I embraced some of what winter had to offer. On the ribbon of frozen river behind our house, I skated for hours feeling as graceful as a ballerina.
My family skied, too, a sport I loved but never conquered. On the slopes, I thrilled at living on the razor-sharp edge between being in control and the next spectacular fall.
I even remember sledding in Hubbard Park. It was like Grand Central Station at rush hour, with adults and children alike careening down the slick slope, mowing down the timid and the weak, until finally bouncing high in the air on the bank of snow thrown up by the snowplow. But those days are past for me; I am too afraid of falling.
More housebound now, I have occupied the early days of this winter by fulfilling an assignment to write something about Ceres, the statue atop the dome of the Vermont Statehouse.
The first Ceres (we are now on our third) was designed in 1858 by Larkin Mead, a young, aspiring sculptor from Brattleboro. He comes to mind because the piece of work that first brought him national attention was carved from ice and snow. On New Year’s Eve in 1856, he and two friends molded the elements at hand into a larger-than-life-sized angel with a grand flourish of wings.
In her hands she held paper and a pen for making a list of the events of the past year. Quickly she was dubbed “Recording Angel,” and she lasted for weeks until a January thaw reduced her to slush.
Sadly, due to climate change that our current presidential administration refuses to address or even acknowledge, Mead would have had a hard time creating another recording angel, this one to document the events of 2025. These days, whether we have enough snow by the turn of the year to carve such a sculpture has become a gamble. As the earth continues to warm, the rain and sleet we saw is just as likely.
This discouraging state of affairs mirrors the dark events that have marked the past year. In stores throughout the downtown I have seen baskets inviting donations of food to help feed neighbors who would otherwise go hungry because of the stoppage of food benefits. Beside a trail where I walk my dog is a tent where someone without housing is suffering the slings and arrows of a winter without adequate shelter.
Recently, a young man standing beside me in the pharmacy was trying without success to get an antibiotic as a prophylactic for a tick bite on his leg. He explained that he could not afford to go to Urgent Care or a doctor to take this simple precaution against Lyme disease.
He would not have been having this awkward public conversation if our nation would guarantee healthcare for all. Throughout the downtown, desperate people shiver for hours in the cold with cardboard signs begging for enough money to live with basic necessities and dignity.
The country’s problems include all this and more. Armed, masked men in bulletproof vests wrestle innocent citizens to the ground, and have been involved in at least seven shootings, two of them fatal. Hardworking immigrants are afraid to go out for milk. Courageous journalists face threats, and first-rate universities tremble when considering their futures.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services has undermined decades of science. The cancellation of healthcare benefits means millions of Americans are being tossed to the wolves. The education of our children will suffer without the services of the Department of Education. Tariffs are raising prices when what people need is economic relief. The world beyond our borders is in terrible shape.
As we press forward, the record of this past year is so chilling that it’s hard for me to know whether the depression I am experiencing comes more from the weak sun or the growing lack of human decency; whether the darkness is more a factor of lack of light or the government’s lack of enlightenment; whether my inability to breathe deeply is due to the frigid air or because, like many people, I am holding my breath in these perilous times. This winter may be everyone’s season of discontent.
