Winter is not my favourite season… and it’s not because of the outrageous heating bills, the terror of driving in whiteouts, the dodging black ice in the grocery store parking lot, the shortened hours of daylight, the cancelled music concerts, or the wind that blew most of the songbirds south.
It’s because I need colour.
I am a devout gardener; my front and back yards are riots of colours for three seasons. Spring and summer and fall each have their own colour-filled delights and they never last long enough. And I’m a visual artist. I sell paintings filled with a range of colours that convey every mood and emotion you can put on canvas. Every room in my house is painted a different colour.
And yet where do I live? In a Snow Belt.
That means that, for what seems at any rate a very large part of every year, we get a lot of snow. A lot.
Which means I find myself surrounded by white, white, white. And cleaning out my driveway and front walk again, and again, and again. Now, living with snow around with this kind of regularity year in year out without colour to delight in was torture. I suffered. But this year, something changed. As with other types of repetitive work, I realise in hindsight it allowed my mind to just wander. This is a good thing for a writer. This cold and brittle white – out world had little outward charm to distract me, and so my mind came up with its own distractions. Let me tell you what happened the other day.
Like you probably do, I think often about writing any given day. If I’m doing a mindless task (washing dishes is another one), I find my imagination can get free reign to wander where it idly wants to go. I have been known in these instances to compose really clever dialogue for my lead characters, and store away descriptions for future scenes from what I observe around me: a thumbprint of saffron brushed against a cobalt sky, that kind of thing. So there I was the other day: in my neighbourhood the front lawns of my neighbours were white; the road was white; the snow banks were white. You’d not think there would be much a writer could do with all that unrelenting sameness.
But somehow I started to look with the eyes of a lover of words: smothering, blanketing, grainy, fluffy, blue shadows, French Lace, icing sugar, – you see?
I had believed that with nothing but a monochromatic world there wouldn’t be much for me to write of winter, the winter that hides flowers’ colours and makes the birds scarce. But the more I was surrounded by it, the more I slowly began to discern subtle details. Beautiful details.
Maybe there’s a lesson there: writers can find ourselves in a mundane place that many would just glance over. But we writers? We will use our words to exalt the sparkling diamonds in a pile of snow under a streetlamp.
