How often have you heard the phrase “sick of winter” lately? It’s a phrase on many lips. As the frigid, single-digit temperatures and biting wind of recent days finally are giving way to the feeling-utterly-balmy 40s and the beginnings of melt – the inexorable winding into spring – take a long look and walk through the snow-covered landscape. Because it isn’t the vibrant new growth of spring, the lush fullness of summer, or the enthralling palette of autumn, we can tend to write off its gifts. It’s like we are waiting it out.

A winter landscape, however, holds its own in wonder. Is there anything that conjures up the word “blanket” so much as the sight of rounded and rippled fields and hills of snow? It is a world that shows us the elemental forms of growth, conveys in its patterns how winds shape the world, gives off a scintillating light, and also possesses color that is pleasing, soothing, and subtle. So many have spoken of this wintry covering as if we are just waiting for it to be gone, when it asks for us to pause, look, and enjoy.

Perhaps this frozen terrain feels somewhat familiar but almost forgotten. I grew up in Western Pennsylvania when snow covered the ground from December to March. This snowy landscape, therefore, has been a joyful, beautiful reminder that yes, a fourth season exists; humankind hasn’t yet warmed it away here — though climate change is, indeed, occurring; and this winter is real and long like those I recall from childhood. (My love of winter may be helped by being a “winter baby.” I was born in January.) It’s an honest time to face the elements and burrow in while the land rests.

Down To Basics

A snowy landscape is one of Nature’s simplest creations, beauty rendered in clear white with long, slender shadows and sculptured shapes. We can behold the basic elements of our natural surroundings, in twigs, branches, limbs, and stone, all in clearest detail. Their patterns are reflected in the snow or silhouetted against the sky. Writing of the “clean beauty” of winter’s elemental forms, journalist and nature author Hal Borland observed that “a tree in winter is so obviously a tree, skeletonized to its very branch and twig. You can see every inch of it, every ridge of its bark and every bud-knob.” Does a tree branch ever seem more likely to come alive in almost-human terms than in such a form?

The landscape’s shapes and colors are all delicacy and not big show. Ripples and mounds in the snow reveal the sculpting of wind and water. From this unrelenting frozen world of weeks and months, we can have some intimation of change over eons, of glaciers in an ancient time. It is landscape that calls for gentle, swaying steps and strides, as skaters and skiers know.

The winter palette’s colors, similarly, are vivid though subdued. We wrongly consider winter a colorless season, as Borland pointed out, “of dull grays and lusterless browns.” A snowy winter landscape reveals a range of icy colors, from crystal-white hills and fields to creamy yellow sunlight on snow to the light blue-purple of shadows or the silvery blue-gray of tiny brooks and ocean waves. The tans, browns, and forest greens stand out against a white backdrop. On the horizon, these colors make a winter blue sky all the more tingly and brilliant, or at other times serene.

A snow-covered land is one of rest but not of waiting. It has its own singular gift and purpose, as the land prepares for another season of growth. Its snows hold the replenishment for the spring and summer crops and plants. Its buds contain the energy and promise that will burst come spring. Its skies present layers of billowy clouds coupled with gray, lavender, and pink light. For now, the winter landscape unfolds, for those awakened to it, in the season’s remaining show of beauty.

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