One sheet over the whole street

Dear friends,

My two kids and I were out of town for the weekend for some Halloween fun, so I am coming to you a day late this week. But with the time change and the overnight temperature drops of the past few days, the delay gave me a chance to reflect on the first real frost of the season. By the time I got out with my coffee to survey the landscape, the sun was already working on it, but the railing boards on my deck were still furred with crystals that stood up like the nap on an old coat. The grass had gone stiff and white-gray. The air had the particular stillness that the first frost brings, which I think is mostly the absence of crickets. They had been slowing for weeks, each night a few fewer chirps to the minute, and sometime after midnight they stopped.

Frost is a quiet thing. It arrives without a sound, asks nothing of anyone, and belongs to no one. I want to write to you this week about what it showed me, because it turns out the frost probably reads my neighborhood better than I do.

What the night wrote

Here is what frost is, as well as I understand it. On a clear, still night the ground gives its heat back to the sky. Nothing holds the heat in, no clouds, no wind to stir the air, and so the grass and the deck rail and the roof of the car my neighbor parks in her driveway cool faster than the air above them. When they drop below freezing, the moisture in the air settles onto them as ice. That is why the thermometer on the deck post can read a few degrees above freezing while the lawn is white. Frost does not happen in the air. It happens on the surfaces of things, wherever they face the open sky.

Because of that, frost is a map. Cold air is heavy and runs downhill like water, so the low spots whiten first and hardest: the dip at the bottom of my sloping side yard, the rudimentary culvert along the road, the hollow where the fog sits in the mornings. Anything with a roof over it stays green. Under a maple there is a ragged circle of unfrosted grass the shape of the canopy, because the branches overhead give back some of the heat the open lawn is losing to the sky. The same under the car, and under the eaves, and in patches of slightly protected ground that appear to have been a nighttime retreat for the deer.

And the roofs. Walk a street on a frosty morning and you will see that the houses, which look alike enough by daylight, are telling different stories. One roof is evenly white. The next has a bare stripe along the ridge, or a melted patch over one room, or no frost at all. The white roof is the one holding its heat. The bare patches are where warmth is leaking out through the attic and melting the frost from underneath. People who do home energy audits for a living read roofs this way. The frost finds every leak, and it does not care whose house it is.

That is the relevant part for today's letter. The frost does not know where my lawn ends and my neighbor's begins. It lays one sheet over the whole street. The only lines it draws are the ones the night actually made: where the cold pooled, where something gave shelter, where warmth got out. The property lines, the ones we pay taxes on and put up fences along, are not in the picture at all.

What it cannot hide

Regular readers know that I have been calling consciousness a commons: the layer beneath our private thoughts that none of us owns and all of us draw on, which Jung called the collective unconscious. I have also been using a word, export, for what we put into that shared layer when we have not dealt with something ourselves. Anger we have not owned goes out as contempt. Fear we have not faced goes out as suspicion. Grief gets handed to someone else to carry.

The roofs gave me a new picture of it. By day every house looks sealed, and so do we. We dress, we smile, we say we are fine. But heat does not stay in a house because the owner would prefer that it did. Whatever we are not keeping warm inside ourselves gets out at night, through the places we have not tended, and the people around us read it in the morning whether they mean to or not. A child reads a parent's roof. So does a partner, and so does the person across the table at work. They may not know what they are seeing. They see it anyway.

Jung put it without much comfort. "Everyone carries a shadow," he wrote, "and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is." He went on to say that a fault we are conscious of can always be corrected, because it stays in contact with the rest of our lives and keeps getting modified, while one we have sealed off from consciousness never gets corrected at all. The frost is the picture I would hang beside that sentence. A leak you know about is a repair you can make. A leak you refuse to know about is a bare patch on the roof that everyone can see but you.

I do not say this to make anyone feel caught. The frost is not a judge. It does not sort the houses into good and bad. It shows, for an hour, what is true, and then the sun comes around the corner of the house and takes the picture away. By mid-morning, the roofs look alike again. The map was there for anyone who got up early enough to read it, and it was kind enough not to last.

The hardy and the tender

Frost often sorts gardens, too, and in a telling way. In a strong enough frost, basil goes black, tomatoes go black, and marigolds go limp and brown. Kale does not, and neither do parsnips. Many gardeners will tell you that these plants actually taste better after a frost, and the reason is worth sitting with. As the nights cool in the weeks before the first freeze, some plants turn part of their starch into sugar. Sugar in the sap lowers the temperature at which the water in the cells will freeze. It is antifreeze, made from the inside, and it happens to be sweet. The plants that come through a frosty night are not tougher in any obvious way. They have been changing their chemistry for weeks, in answer to a cold that was not yet dangerous. And when the frost comes, they are not only ready for it but, to our tongues, improved by it.

Basil and tomatoes are not foolish. They simply run their summer programs on an autumn night, making summer leaves until the hour they cannot. Jung wrote about the same thing in people. "Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life's morning." The sugar in the kale was made on the cool nights, not the freezing one. You cannot make it the night the frost comes. The work that gets a person through a hard season is the quiet work of the weeks before it, done in answer to a chill that is not yet an emergency.

And the sweetness, once made, is not private. It goes to whoever is at the table.

A practice for this week

It is going to be a loud week in a lot of places, with tomorrow's midterm elections. I would like to keep the porch quiet, so here is one small thing.

Get up early one morning, before the sun reaches the yard, and go read the frost. It will not take long, because it will not last. Notice where it lies thick, and where the cold pooled. Notice what stayed green, and what was sheltering it. If you can see a few roofs, notice which ones are holding their heat. Then, if you like, do the same reading on yourself. Where in your week does the cold pool? What has been sheltering you without being asked, and have you thanked it? And where, honestly, is the bare patch on the roof, the thing that has been getting out at night while you hoped nobody could see?

You do not have to fix the leak this week. You only have to know it is there. A leak you know about is in contact with the rest of your life, as Jung said, and that is where repairs begin. Knowing is most of what tending comes to.

And when the sun comes around the house and the map begins to disappear, let it fade. The frost does its reading and lets it go. That seems to me a good way to read a neighbor, and a good way to read yourself.

With care from the porch,

R

References

• Jung, C. G. (1969). Psychology and religion. In Psychology and religion: West and East (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., Collected Works Vol. 11, para. 131). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1938)
• Jung, C. G. (1969). The stages of life. In The structure and dynamics of the psyche (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., Collected Works Vol. 8, para. 784). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1931)
• Snyder, R. L., & de Melo-Abreu, J. P. (2005). Frost protection: Fundamentals, practice and economics (Vol. 1). Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
• Thomashow, M. F. (1999). Plant cold acclimation: Freezing tolerance genes and regulatory mechanisms. Annual Review of Plant Physiology and Plant Molecular Biology, 50, 571–599.