The term winter wonderland always makes me chuckle. A few days ago, my sister-in-law used it, as it was meant to be used, in imitation of my late mother whose innocent delight in life was almost comical sometimes, especially to her jaded and oh-so-sophisticated offspring. (Hey, all kids are like that.) But her innocence was also quite disarming, and even in her most banal expressions of the deep way in which she actually experienced beauty, there was truth.
So it was, as my husband and I drove a mere 20 miles on a pre-Christmas, post-snowfall errand in Southwest England, that the words winter wonderland popped into my head. The landscape, through some deep woods with their straight tall trees reaching up from the Cornish slopes, was coated not in snow, and not in ice as so often in the mid-Atlantic US, but with frost. It was like hoarfrost gone mad, hoarfrost given leave to create an alien world so beautiful, one could almost imagine crystalline creatures living there, keeping warm in the deep inner green of the frosted fir trees, flitting happily from one ivy leaf to another, landing lightly between the frosted edges of the leaves to dance on the still warm greensward.
The Queen Anne’s Lace stood erect and singular on the verges. Its lacy head of tiny flowers grouped as if an embroiderer had created them with so many French knots stood still and blue-white on the delicate stalks that hold the floral abundance to the single, sturdy stalk.
Gnarled trees, old and wise, stood fieldward behind frost-gray hedgerows, separating one herd of sheep from another. White-blue, leafless limbs twined against a gun-metal sky, a sky with tinges of pink hope skipping at the horizon, or parting clouds higher up to announce that tomorrow―maybe tomorrow―there would be full sun. Maybe tomorrow all the inconveniences and danger, and beauty, of the snowfalls, melted into a much more mundane form, would be on their way to the sea, down gullies and roadways and soaking into farmland to emerge again as part of a wheat stalk, or soaked into the earth to be given up at a holy well by and by.
The Gulf Stream, hugging the Cornish coast, made mist of the melting snow from the eastern storm, arriving for several days running from its birthplace in Mother Russia. The mist, when the sun dropped early below the hilly horizon, froze the mist in place. Thus were there no breaks in the blue-white foliage patina, as with fallen snow falling off again and going to ground. Thus was there no glissade of almost-water as there is following an ice storm. There was only silent, constant, even frosting on the entire woodsy landscape. Frosting on limbs and branches, on the bark of trunks, on every edge of every living ivy leaf climbing the trees, evergreen like the frosted firs standing, holding birds within their soft branches, inside where the mist and frost did not penetrate. There was a depth in the landscape, a welcoming heart, announced by a fragile beauty seen few places on earth.
There’s no more. That’s my Christmas gift to you, if you’re reading this. It’s my Christmas gift to my intensely missed mother, whose delight in the beauties of today would take my breath away as surely as the scene itself.
But wait. There’s one more gift, a photo by my friend Rachel Burch, landscape photographer, who tramped the moors today to see what it was like on the windswept side of Dartmoor, where snow remains, mists are banished, and sheep do exactly what sheep do, gathering together because they are sheep, and heedless that some of us use the word that names them as an insult to other humans. On Dartmoor, to be a sheep in winter is to be safe, an excellent thing, and as beautiful as any creature on earth can be.
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| Photo by Rachel Burch |
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