Winter Audit
I used to think winter was death.
Now I think it is accounting.
Not the loud kind—
not the quarterly panic of business men—
but the quiet reckoning written in frost.
The fields go still.
The trees surrender their leaves
like old arguments finally released.
Even the rivers slow their speech.
In New England,
winter is not subtle.
It arrives with iron in its lungs,
with wind that scrapes the last vanity from the branches.
It does not negotiate.
It cleans.
Snow falls not as decoration
but as a white ledger,
covering the excess,
the rot,
the evidence of what grew too fast.
Beneath it, the earth rests—
not dead,
but disciplined.
Seeds wait in the dark
like ideas not yet ready for daylight.
Roots hold fast,
testing themselves against the freeze.
Weakness does not survive this season.
Winter is mercy disguised as severity.
It strips the maple to bone.
It drives the animals inward.
It shortens the days
until we are forced to sit with ourselves
without the distraction of bloom.
We call it bleak
because it will not flatter us.
But there is honesty in the cold.
The air is sharp enough to cut illusion.
The sky, a hard blue verdict.
The landscape speaks in absolutes:
endurance or surrender.
And in that stillness,
something ancient happens.
The soil reorganizes.
The pests die back.
The noise fades.
Under ice,
water remembers how to flow.
Under snow,
the field rehearses resurrection.
Winter is not an ending—
it is the cleansing before covenant,
the fasting before feast.
When spring comes
it will not be sentimental.
It will be earned.
Green will break through
because it survived the trial.
Light will stretch longer
because darkness pressed it thin.
The crocus will rise
not in spite of winter
but because of it.
So let the cold come.
Let it scour what is weak,
quiet what is loud,
cover what has overreached.
The earth knows what it is doing.
Before rebirth,
there must be stillness.
Before abundance,
a narrowing.
Before color,
white.
Winter is the cleanse.
And somewhere beneath the frost,
life is gathering its strength.
And just when I submit the strength of life returns and it is spring!