Winter morning. The gray sky lightens, and the skeletal black branches of trees emerge from the dark. The animal of my body wants to sleep until spring, but instead I rise and slip quietly down the steps to fill the moka pot with dark-roast coffee. Soon the kitchen smells like a new beginning. I carry two steaming cups upstairs to my partner, and our day begins. He checks the weather.
“Thirty-one degrees,” he announces brightly.
We live in a small northern town with a constellation of lakes. He celebrates any day that is below freezing, because freezing brings ice, and ice brings adventure and beauty.
My partner grew up in California, where there was no ice except for indoor rinks, and he fell in love with the Midwest in large part because of the outdoor skating. He bought himself some skates and played pickup pond hockey every chance he got. I love skating, too, but not with the same intensity. When he insisted—on the coldest nights, with windchills of twenty below—that we bundle up and grab our skates, I realized I would have to give up my propensity toward hibernation for the sake of this relationship. We’d stomp down to the blue-white snowdrifts at the edges of the ice and, fingers stiff in the cold, tighten our laces. Then we’d sail across what only weeks ago had been water.
The best nights are when moonlight comes through the trees, casting indigo shadows across the ice. My partner swoops around, his arms swinging in front of his crouched body. “It’s the closest we get to flying,” he said once as he sailed past me. Another time: “Maybe this is how a dolphin feels carving through the water.” He loves the tension of the blade slicing across the surface, the whoosh of his skates drawing elaborate patterns on the ice, the crunch of a hockey stop. I listen for the occasional owl.
We went night skating on one of our first dates. After circling until we were warm and tired, we lay on the ice and stared at the stars. The sky seemed close, as if winter could easily overtake us if there were no warm house for us to return to. We felt alive and vulnerable.
I had always preferred wandering through green fields in summer, spying the marvels there: crickets, bumblebees, toads, wrens. It took me a long time to recognize that the winter landscape was alive, too, just slower. I learned to watch for cardinals, foxes, great horned owls. I learned about the gray tree frog that slows her metabolism, lets her body freeze, and waits to thaw in the spring. I wondered if I at last understood Wallace Stevens’s idea that “one must have a mind of winter.”
This year the gray mornings have been harder, not because of my seasonal depression—I’ve been taking vitamin D and getting outside daily—but because it hasn’t been cold enough. My partner looks at his phone and groans, “High of forty-five.” At the end of November it was twenty degrees for a couple of nights, and he took our skates to be sharpened. But then the temperatures went back up. All over the Midwest records are being broken. Wisconsin ice-fishing contests have been delayed. Hockey players have had to play indoors. Snowplows have stayed home. I wonder what will happen to the gray tree frogs that thaw too early. A flower blooms out of season in our yard.
For people to skate outdoors, the ice needs to be at least four inches thick, and it’s best when the hard freezes come before the first heavy snow. One New Year’s Eve I took my children to a nearby lake at midnight. During the day the ice was so clear you could see the underwater plants beneath you, but at night it was like obsidian, a shiny black surface that made it seem like you were gliding through space. I lay down and put my ear to the ice. What I heard astonished me: every step echoed across it, the ice ringing like a giant cymbal, making me conscious of both its fragility and its tenacity. How was this possible?
In elementary-school science class we saw how many droplets of water could fit on a penny, and were mesmerized by the way the surface tension held and a little dome of water grew. We learned that ice floats on water because, unlike most substances, water expands when frozen, creating space between the molecules, making itself lighter, the way laughter lightens a mood. And we were awestruck by snowflakes with their dazzling, one-of-a-kind geometric designs. Novelist Jeanette Winterson wrote, “They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?”
Once, my sister went through the ice on a spring-fed pond. Luckily the water wasn’t particularly deep, and my dad was able to pull her out. Another time, my blue heeler fell through a frozen edge of the Mississippi. I saw the ice crack and watched him plunge below the surface. The ice was too thin and the water too deep for me to get to him, so I screamed his name over and over. Suddenly his pointed ears surfaced, and he pawed his way to the edge and somehow knew to keep his body flat as he pulled himself to safety.
This year we have lost four lives already: two when people went through the ice up north, where by this time in many years past it would be safe to drive a snowmobile onto a lake. The other two were siblings, ages six and eight, who just got off the school bus and wandered out onto a pond that was far too thin to walk on. They never made it home.
Last year was the hottest on record. The amount of Arctic ice that was lost in those twelve months could cover the continental United States: icebergs seeping tears, the earth weeping.
In my twenties I lived briefly in Nepal, where the Himalayas were covered in snow through spring. The frozen region above the Sherpa village where I lived seemed permanent. But since 2010 the glaciers there have melted 65 percent faster than in the previous decade. In pictures some of those mountains now show naked stone year-round.
My partner and I go to the lake early one morning in January and find hundreds of geese floating on open water. There are a few rafts of ice, just thin veneers. Mist shrouds the trees on the far edge. I am intoxicated by the colors. He looks like a child who’s just learned his bike has been stolen.
Not long ago I stayed in a cottage on the Dingle Peninsula, a couple of hours’ drive south of Ireland’s Cliffs of Moher, where it is said the Cailleach—the powerful, terrible Celtic goddess who controls cold and winds—is responsible for the craggy landscape. The cottage had been built with the slate-gray stone common to that rocky spit of land. Sheep wandered past the window, along a road that ran parallel to the sea. It was a hard place. Nothing felt tender there. One night I stood alone under the stars expecting—what? Perhaps to connect with my ancestors or, more accurately, with the spirit of that place, something I often do at home. Earlier that day I had visited an ancient fort that predated Christ by 3,200 years. Now I faced the dark sea and the enormous sky and felt a sudden sense of vertigo. An ancient, cold entity seemed to expand above me. I was nothing in the face of this earth spirit, which I felt could swallow me. Afraid, I ran back to my cottage and slammed the door, thinking about the ghosts who must haunt that region. What had I encountered? My own mortality? Or the great hag herself, the goddess of cold and wind?
As we walk to the lake again today to see if the great eye of water in the center is closing, I feel an urge to lay offerings on the water’s edge, to promise that cold spirit that we will change as a people. I don’t want winters to end. I want to walk in the frigid air with my breath turning to ice on my eyelashes. I want to watch sunlight gleam through ice-covered branches. I want to hold hands with my sweetheart and skate across the miracle.