Every Winter Feels Like The Last
Reflections on the coming of spring and defeat of winter
My family has taken to teasing me over my annual surprise when a shrubbery or tree on our property shows signs of life around March or April. I must admit, I do look at my plants in the winter and think to myself, “Well, that’s it. They’re dead.” And I do this every year.
I kneel at the side of my bushes and snap their branches to check the inside for moist green. I stare at them for long periods of time, wondering if I need to uproot the plant and toss it out for a new one.
Tonight over dinner, I noticed that our tree in the backyard was beginning to reveal fresh buds where pink flowers will soon blossom. My surprise was evident. Many of the other trees on the property had already flowered, and in the back of my mind, the only explanation for why this one hadn’t done so yet was that it had finally died.
Maybe I’m a fringe lunatic, and this is just evidence that I lack a certain chill. It also might reflect my lack of faith in miracles.
Spring is something of a miracle. I don’t easily take to miracles.
I don’t believe I suffer from what they call “seasonal depression” or a melancholy related to the weather. Maybe this year I did. A lot of things happened that I wish could be undone. It’s been a sad winter, and I will not miss it one bit.
This year, my shock at the return of flowers in my garden bed and fresh leaves on my bushes might have been the greatest it’s ever been.
I believed this winter was never going to end.
And then it did. Literally like clockwork, on schedule, it was over.
With Easter coming soon, the subject of miracles is on my mind more than usual. It is also the case that Easter was my Dad’s favorite holiday. He was very cheesy about his love for Easter. A season of renewal and second chances.
I couldn’t quite decide what to name this feeling I have about winter overstaying its welcome. It’s not that “every summer feels like the last” because when summer ends, I’m usually quite grateful for the return of cold breezes. And it’s not that “every spring feels like the last” because when spring becomes summer, you almost don’t even notice. The transition is very smooth.
But the phrase that was on my heart today is that “every winter feels like the last” in the sense that it is here to stay. No more seasons. No more change. No more renewal. Just ice and mud, forever.
Something C.S. Lewis would always come back to in his work was a general disdain for winter. He’d complain loudly at Oxford, where he worked and resided, about the dreary conditions and mud clinging to his boots. When he represented a fallen world in Narnia by making it a sheet of ice, commanded by a White Witch of winter, he was expressing a personal animus about the season. “Always winter but never Christmas”, which was to say that winter could not possibly be joyous without the celebration of Christ’s birth. Something, anything, to bring hope to a season that feels in opposition to the very idea of human beings.
“Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary. Belief in miracles, far from depending on an ignorance of the laws of nature, is only possible in so far as those laws are known.”
― C.S. Lewis, Miracles
I’m reading C.S. Lewis’s Miracles right now alongside Out Of The Silent Planet. This passage above stuck out to me regarding my doubt that spring would ever come. Perhaps I’ve been fixated so much on the reality of death and decay that I’m now in awe of a little light and added color on the roadside.
Every winter feels like the last.
This haunting thing of stasis with no change.
If winter remained forever, there would be no context for seasons of any kind. Winter would cease to be a thing at all. For winter is only winter because it is not like spring, summer, or fall. In this frigid and dark dystopia, the conditions of this thing called winter would just….be.
It would be all there is, so why even name it?
Winter is only so because there exists a memory of what came before and what can be when it’s over.
Memory and hope.
Winter tries to rid us of both. But I believe in miracles, even still.
Hello, spring. What took you so long?