Winter into Spring

January 2025

A week of freezing cold, of buffeting winds, makes our little house shake. The mist blankets the bay, then lifts to reveal churning grey seas by day and piercing stars at night. Bundled, I walk my inland route, barely protected by dunes. I inspect seemingly lifeless twigs, serrated patterns of sand and ice, colored stones laced by brilliant seaweed. A week of cups of tea and toast, of lying on a couch with a dog, chatting with my friend. 

On the windiest day, we go to the bay. The dog keeps her head down. Spray and sand are flying. The waves are peaking and crashing on the beach. We hold on to each other. We walk a short way, overtaken by the power of it all. 

We allow the future to come at us in tiny doses. Do we want to follow the news? Can we hold on to our internal compasses? Will they spin out of control? Is it even possible to set a course? My friend says, “I may not live to see us regain the changes we fought for. It is humbling.” When the cold afternoon sun lights up the floors, we sweep up glinting sand in a desultory way. No need to have things perfectly clean.

My sister is moving to England. She says, “I must leave before the inauguration.” I try to focus on the deep connection she feels to England, to her friends, to the countryside. She returns to her theme: “Yes, and things are going to be awful here. I wish I were more resilient. I thought growing up in our family, I would be inoculated to authoritarianism, but I am not.” 

“I don’t think that is how it works.”

She feels guilty and excited that she is leaving; she worries that I am staying. Envy is close at hand. 

Am I minimizing how bad it will be? Am I the unseeing optimist, the normalizer? Is she the one who is choosing to leave just in time?

“I know you must go. It’s a brave decision.” 

The panic and confusion I felt in late 2016 returns—panic that led me to make deep changes in my life—panic that quieted briefly during the hiatus. I wonder what is to come, how will I do my part to resist the onslaught—how will we all. 

There is nothing more for me to say.  

One evening I go to see local friends. After we polish off a bottle of Prosecco and nibble on dates, each filled with Boursin and a walnut, B. says, “I know you are going to talk politics now; I’ll head off.”  

“But what do you think? I want to hear.” 

B. is a Vietnam War vet, an explorer, a self-taught archaeologist, someone who does not shy away from what he sees. 

“I think it’s going to be very bad. I don’t know if we will ever have another election. I hate what we have done to other countries.” J. and B. finish each other’s words: “And to our own.”  

It is easier to taste the cold wave of fear in the company of dear friends. B., ever searching, has learned that in in this region alone, there were thirty-two Indigenous communities. “When I look along the bay, I can see all those settlements.”  

“I bet you can.” 

I talk about what I have learned: the storm of 1841 killed 57 sailors and sank seven local ships. Only one boat returned, captained by a twenty-one-year-old man. B. says, “Yes. Imagine the shoals. A wave would take a ship up, and then drop her down into a trough, but just below the surface are the bars of sand. The ships broke like matchsticks.”  

 “Deadly shoals” is no longer a phrase on a page.

 

*

 

The Inauguration: Winter 1961

Robert Frost, America’s great poet of winter, recited “The Gift Outright” at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961.¹  He was 86 years old, a small man with still-thick white hair standing in the bitter cold. I wondered how I knew this. I realized that I was a little girl, sitting beside my mother in San Francisco, seeing the figure of Robert Frost on a black-and-white television screen. 

Recently I learned that, at the last moment, Frost had written “Dedication” to precede “The Gift Outright,” the poem Kennedy had requested and that Frost had prepared for. Despite Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to shield him, Frost had been blinded by the sun’s cold glare on that bitterly icy day. So, he abandoned reading “Dedication,” and he recited only “The Gift Outright.” 

Hopeful, I looked up “The Gift Outright.” I was taken aback by Frost’s use of the ready currency of white colonialism.  

The land was ours before we were the land’s.

To the land vaguely realizing westward …

 

But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,

Such as she was, such as she would become.

And “Dedication,”² the poem Frost was not able to read, was even more problematic. Commentators on these poems selected for the inauguration have spoken of Kennedy’s ideas of “American exceptionalism” and “manifest destiny,” which these poems of Frost echoed.^{3 4}  Many people in America, my mother included, and around the world, were swept up in the shared fantasy of Camelot in all its glamor and hubris. We (white Americans) were an exceptional people at the crest of hope! 

That year, a meteorologist in Monthly Weather Review wrote a plodding piece about that winter that turned out to be more prophetic of the swirling dangers enveloping us.

The highlight of the change in regime was a severe storm … which caused heavy snow in major cities along the east coast from Washington, DC, to Boston, Mass. Severe blizzard conditions were reported in southern New England where northerly gales caused extensive flooding of coastal lowlands…. In the Midwest, this was the driest January in 90 years or more.(weather.gov/rlx/jan61).  

Rachel Carson published Silent Spring one year later, in 1962. ⁵

A child, whose father lived far away, sitting next to her mother, had been riveted by the sight of the elderly poet standing in the cold beside the new young president. It was the shape of the man, with this thick white hair, in his dark coat, that conveyed his contribution to American poetry. She, too, needed to believe that somewhere, someone, between Frost and Kennedy, would guide us through the deadly shoals ahead. 

Ironically, it was President Johnson, deeply disdained by the Kennedys and most New Englanders, who faced the marchers from South and North, Black and white, and forged the next great step in America’s worthier aspirations. 

As I face into winter and trudge along in the freezing cold, I realize I no longer dread the icy winds off the Hudson River, the shortened, darkened days.  

There are other things I dread. Winter chills to the bone, winter kills people, but it does not lie. There is a dishonesty, a gratuitous cruelty to this new regime. The obsession with revenge is not part of the seasons of nature. In this current regime, there is no feeling of cold winds blowing, no sense of waters roiling, no sadness for people at the mercy of floods or drought or burning heat. There is no empathy for people subjected to cruelty. There is no guidance through the storms and sandbars of our nation’s original sin.

Here is an excerpt from one of Robert Frost’s most memorable poems.

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

 

*

 

Not Yet Spring: Late April 2025

I have returned to the little house for a brief respite. The sun is shining, and the bay glistens. Branches are brown and grey with hints of red. The squirrel marauds the bird feeder once again. The daffodils are out; lilacs and irises will unfold soon. 

Last night I heard loud buzzing, so loud I imagined it was a clump of flies. I went to bed.  Maybe they would die, and I would sweep them up in the morning. I woke to the buzzing— now sporadic. I felt bad that I had waited so long, hoping that things would take care of themselves and allow me to move on, carelessly sweeping up the mess. Noise, noise, noise.  Silence. I pulled back the couch and found one large square bumblebee. Despite its staggering exhaustion, the bee evaded me and my paper towel. It flew furiously up the windowpane, then hurled itself toward my face. I could feel its intelligence. This skillful pathfinder had been rendered powerless by prison walls of glass, the same windows that open the world to me.

I poured myself a cup of tea. The bee returned to the lower corner of the window. 

I found a small glass and captured it. The bumblebee buzzed in outrage that vibrated in my hand, making it seem much larger than it was. I gingerly slid a sheet of paper under the lip of the glass. I prayed the bee would not find the tiny spot where the paper creased away from the glass’s lip.  

We made our uneasy, vibrating way to the open door. I slid the paper away and shook the glass. The bee landed on the low heather bush below. I watched it reach out its thin little legs to hug one purple blossom, then another, before it flew away. I imagined its desperate, visceral relief at escaping a horrifying prison and, miraculously, finding the smell and touch of home.

 

*

 

Tomorrow, I return to my home in the city. Spring will be in full bloom. I’ll walk in the sun under heavy-budded trees. And then, the names of people whom this shameless regime has imprisoned will be read aloud.