The Winter Metaphor
By Lulu Miller
My all-time favorite party was this:
My friend Ross said that over the hills, about five hours away, lay a tiny town in West Virginia where each year people convene to murder winter. The tradition is called Fasnacht and has roots in Swiss culture. Everybody wears a paper mâché mask, dances around an effigy of Old Man Winter, and then at midnight, tears him down and sets him on fire. The hope is that the next morning will bring spring. We went and I was picturing Burning Man but it was more square dance in a school gymnasium. Old people. Cookie trays. No alcohol. I made a mask with two curling, green horns that left my lips exposed. I was newly split from a seven-year relationship. The Celtic Goddess of Winter has dark blue skin and rust-colored teeth. Mine were well on their way from months of whiskey and coffee. It was hard to be sober.
And we were.
Till we weren’t.
After the burn, the olds pulled out their mandolins and started playing and Ross knew which group to follow into which house and inside the couches were deep and there were so many bottles. We awoke in sleeping bags; we awoke to snow. “It worked!” I thought. Till I realized, precisely, it didn’t.
*
I loved the party not because of some amazing encounter (I was as stiff as paper mâché myself, feeling the edges of my awkwardness, my loneliness, poking out), but because of its premise. That so many people would gather to denigrate winter’s corporeal form, in the hopes of getting it over with any faster.
*
It’s not that I don’t see it, amidst the twinkle-lights and brighter stars and cardinals; winter has its perks:
- Brighter days.
- Longer nights.
- Sound travels slower but farther.
- You can whisper a secret for miles.
- Fires feel warmer and red wine tastes better and find me a kid who doesn’t like cracking gutter ice.
- Friction takes a holiday. Gliding along horizontal planes, even upwards, is suddenly allowed. A world we believed to be bound by certain gravities is unbuckled.
Just a few weeks back, deep in the dark pit of the solstice, my friend Jeffy sent me a playlist that “considers migratory patterns, loneliness, and renewal. Designed for a headphones listen on a morning meditation or evening stroll.” You don’t get that stuff in summer, when people are too busy enjoying the earth to remind one another how to enjoy the earth.
It’s just that I love heat. I love opening my heart to the world instead of hunching and bundling away from it.
Moving to Chicago last summer was not easy for me.
I did it for love. For my wife, who is from here.
This is not an essay about learning to love winter.
*
The Greek God of Winter has shards of ice in his shaggy beard. He carries a conch shell and has a penchant for kidnapping. His legs are snakes. The Celtic Goddess, the one with the rust-colored teeth—a cyclops by the way—carries a hammer and makes mountains out of tantrums. The Norse god carries an arrow; the Aztec god has a scythe for a head. There is a violence to the metaphor.
There is a violence to the reality too, it seems. Just look at the trees, stripped of their green. Just look at the soil, stripped of its blossoms. Just feel your fingers, gotcha. You can’t.
The poets and neuroscientists, the ones that I like anyway, warn, however, that we’ve got no true grasp of reality. Our brains are always getting in the way. Sight is a picture show manufactured behind your eyes, full of glitches and lies. The same with sound, with taste—fabrications, hallucinations. But temperature? That always felt like the loophole. Stick your arm into the cold and you are feeling the cold. You are touching reality. A one to one.
“Our brains are always getting in the way. Sight is a picture show manufactured behind your eyes, full of glitches and lies. The same with sound, with taste—fabrications, hallucinations. But temperature? That always felt like the loophole. Stick your arm into the cold and you are feeling the cold. You are touching reality. A one to one.”
But nope. Scientists have dashed that dream too. For decades they’ve piled up evidence that suggests our sensations of temperature are manufactured from the inside. Tell a person to think about someone they love, for example, and—boom—they rate the ambient temperature as 3 degrees warmer. Exclude them from a game of dodgeball, and their estimates drop. And it’s not just in their minds; when researchers placed a thermometer on their skin, they found that the rejected people’s skin temperature dropped, on average, 0.68 Fahrenheit degrees. Your brain has never been one for authenticity. Its core mission is manipulation, tricking your body into doing whatever it takes to keep you alive.
Which, I guess, cracks the door on the possibility that it’s not as cold out there in Chicago as I think? A body, even a mammalian body, is not condemned to freeze to death in the freeze. Allow me to introduce you to the arctic squirrel who burrows deep in subzero weather, sets its body clock to run slow and—just think about how evolutionarily transgressive this is—doesn’t need food. Allow me to introduce you to the NASA scientists exploring the feasibility of inducing human torpor; allow me to introduce you to the ER doctors already trying a version it—cooling a patient’s body to run slow to buy the doctors more time (two different time-space continuums thumping there, side by side, under the same set of florescent lights), and—get this—it works.
*
When we first landed in Chicago, my father-in-law, a tender and perceptive man, whispered a secret, “Cardio helps.” He knew one of the hardest things for me about leaving Virginia was leaving behind my daily communion with trees—there were mountains out our old back door, rapids just beyond the threshold, silence waiting everywhere. He promised that come about October 1st, the lakefront trail clears out. And he was right. The first hint of a chill in the air and the droves disappeared. He bikes for dozens of miles. I run for a handful. The trail is all mine. The lake goes turquoise. Gallons of horizon to sip.
It’s how I survive the first winter. On the thought that temperature is manufactured by the brain and a pair of good running-gloves. This winter, our second, is harder. With the virus getting its second wind, no museums or playdates allowed for our toddler, our two-bedroom apartment closes in.
Toward the end of December, it drops to 17 degrees. I head out to the lake trail. To the electroacoustic loops of Jeffy’s playlist, choral breaths stretched to grains, I notice the exposed nests, the high top birds, the quieted grey sky—and then my phone dies. Not because I didn’t charge it. From the cold. And I am plummeted into a fresh ring of hell. Out in the cold and… alone with my thoughts?
My brain starts taking my vitals. My spine, too soft for my day job. My skin, too thin. There is that blockage of guilt near the spleen. And then pops my mom. From somewhere near the kidneys. An image of her floats up. She is crouched on the forest floor, stringing multi-colored lights around a small pine tree. She texted my sisters and I a photo of it the other day. She said it was something she had always wanted to do, pick a little tree on the woodsy hill next to her house and decorate it with lights. And this year she finally did it. The photo she sent was horrible. It was out of focus with the flash catching fog in the foreground. But behind a sea of darkened trunks, you could see it; this one tiny triangle, glowing.
Why this thought?
My mom is in the winter of her life, maybe that’s it. Her hair is whiter, her advice is better.
When I tell her I am trying to write about winter, she emails me with a scene from her pandemic life, with my recently-retired dad, in the cold of New England. They’ve taken to stopping by their neighbors’ backyard each night, warming up with tea or wine by a bonfire.
“And I think of how fairytales were first told around fires,” she writes. “The nights, even when it is cold, during this pandemic, have come alive with voices gathered here and there, not shoppers streaming down streets, not bars, but something more primitive, closer to a more ancient, enduring way.”
There will be a day she isn’t here.
Unlike winter, which comes a-fricking-round again.
Maybe I’m angry at the metaphor, not the season. It’s a bad metaphor when applied to humans. It promises a spring that will never come.
I keep running.
Scientists have codified the many ways we try to raise our body temperatures. We burrow; we shiver; we run; we huddle, we bundle. We seek shelter; we seek sunlight. We steal heat from others. Kleptothermy, this behavior is called. There are snakes who steal heat from birds, lizards who steal from termite nests, wives who steal from wives—and are kicked for having cold feet, and protest by burrowing closer and whispering, “you brought us here.” As for getting cold, our main move is this: increasing our surface area. We extend our limbs to the wind. I realize, when I see this outlined so clearly, that what I am doing in summer when I open my heart to the world, when I claim to be savoring heat, is, in fact, lusting for cold.
I have about a mile to go.
Will winter itself even fit the metaphor for much longer? Are we walking diamond-encrusted streets, right now, with all this slush? Will icicles one day be as enchanted as the unicorn? Are we living inside the snowglobe our grandchildren will never be able to enter?
Try as I might, I can’t get greed alone—the thought of winter’s encroaching scarcity—snap me into savoring it. I want heat. Hot water. Fire.
“Will winter itself even fit the metaphor for much longer? Are we walking diamond-encrusted streets, right now, with all this slush? Will icicles one day be as enchanted as the unicorn? Are we living inside the snowglobe our grandchildren will never be able to enter?”
My mom’s knees pop in my mind. They pop as she crouches down to plug an extension cord into the side of the house. I picture the spring in her step as she marches up the hill to the pine tree, and the sag when she realizes the cord isn’t long enough. I picture her going back into the basement, rustling below shelves of dusty vases to find a nest of old cables. She grabs the orange one from the eighties and a white one that may or may not be safe for outdoor use. She plugs them together. She risks sparks. Her shoulder, broken two years ago from a fall, aches as she coils the lights around the bristly green branches, higher and higher. She waits—I am sure of this—she waits to plug it in until it is dark.
All that effort for a gloomy kid, in a backseat of a car maybe, for a lonely guy walking his dog, to catch a glimpse of a fairytale.
I find, quite suddenly, I am back to our apartment.
Kleptothermy. There are those that steal heat from birds, and those that steal from termites, and those that, when all other methods fail, steal from their own imaginations.
Maybe the winter metaphor should do away with her hammers and scythes, with her violence and snakes. Maybe she should swing a wide bucket, a prospector’s pick. Maybe I should stop attending pagan festivals that call for her demise. Maybe I should consider, for just one moment, the singular effect winter has on the body. She’s the season that forces you to locate your own private warmth, the long-forgotten stores of it, buried beneath sediment of neglect and petty resentments, and allows it to come surging to the surface. It’s the season that breaks the trap of perception, not by letting you touch something real from without, but from within.
Lulu Miller is a Peabody award-winning science journalist, co-host of WNYC's Radiolab, and cofounder of NPR’s Invisibilia. She is the author of Why Fish Don't Exist, a nonfiction scientific thriller and memoir that The National Book Review called a "small marvel of a book" and left the New York Times “smitten.” Her written work has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Geurnica,VQR, Catapult and beyond. Her reporting interests include disability, mental health, and, inexplicably, entomology.