Dreading winter? Not me*
*Except in its effects on the pandemic. Also, flower of the week
When I moved to Boston in 2015, I was very concerned about the winter. Family and friends who live here warned of the previous winter’s “Snowpocalypse,” in which several feet of snow became the ordinary ground cover, the trains were shut down, and people were sledding out of their second-story windows.
But I was less concerned about the snow than about how short the days would be. Boston is pretty far north, I was told, and the height of winter is grim and dark. The shortening of days had the terror of a slowly advancing circular saw: mechanical, inevitable, and merciless. The result: seasonal depression and despair. You’ll wish you lived anywhere else (to the south, anyway.)
That year, my instinctive appreciation for fall—an amazing season in the Northeast—was tempered by close attention to the sunset’s creeping advance and what that might mean for my mental health. The end of daylight savings at the start of November was a rough jolt: suddenly it felt like the days were wrapping up at 3:30.
Once I had taken the plunge into November, though, things started feeling much more normal. Living in an apartment without air conditioning, it was a relief when the summer heat subsided. High-pressure systems stuck around for days, providing long stretches of blue skies even if the air was chilly. I began taking walks in the evening and enjoying the clarity of the air and the city lights.
It occurs to me now that I don’t think I would have been afraid of shorter days in the Northeast had people not told me to worry about it. Growing up, I had always looked forward fall and winter. In Missouri, fall is brief and beautiful, a colorful few weeks of transition. The end of the year included my birthday as well as my other favorite holidays—Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. I adore winter sunsets in Missouri, with the sky rimmed with red and distant ice clouds, the upper sky pale blue. I more or less worshipped snow, and in high school would eagerly discuss the details of the National Weather Service’s latest snow forecast for St. Louis with similarly obsessed friends.
When you run the numbers, the shortening of the days is not so different in Boston versus St. Louis: the winter solstice in Boston will have a daylength of 9 hours, 4 minutes, and 36 seconds, while St. Louis, it will be 9 hours, 27 minutes, and 57 seconds. The difference in latitude, while big enough to affect the climate, is nothing like the difference between, say, St. Louis and St. Petersburg, Russia, where in the summer it’s bright out at 10 p.m. at night, and in the winter, well, you get the idea.
Growing up, it had never occurred to me to be sad about shortening days. Certainly there’s a point in every fall where I mourn the end of summer activities like swimming and biking without risking frostbite, but after that I move on to enjoying the fall leaves and hoping for snow.
That’s not to lessen anyone else’s experience with seasonal affective disorder or just general malaise caused by winter. I’m very lucky that winter doesn’t get to me. (It’s consecutive days of rain that gets me down, which is why March and April here are rough.) And the effect of colder weather on increasing COVID cases is, of course, awful, and we should take public health measures to lessen it.
It’s just that with everything else to worry about right now, I’ve done some internal accounting and decided that being sad about winter is not going to be on my list this year. I’m just going to enjoy the weather like I would when I’d read fantasy books in my childhood bedroom, watching the early sunset through the window, and try to will snow days into existence—before I knew better, before I thought I should be afraid of winter.
More than having a favorite season, I like that there are seasons where I live, riding the roller coaster of the months up and down, seeing the land in each form of light the year has to offer. It’s one of many, many reasons to fight climate change: we need winter. Hard freezes limit mosquito and tick populations. Do we even need more reasons?
When I finished my grad program in Boston and moved to Omaha, Nebraska, for the next one in 2016, a coworker told me, “Stay warm!” I’ve always thought about this.
Flower of the week: Yellow toadflax
With winter approaching, I’m going to start recognizing some of the all-season heroes that have continued offering their nectar, pollen, and color from spring frost until fall frost. Yellow toadflax (Linaria vulgaris) is one such flower. When I first moved here I thought it might be some sort of coastal specialty, since I’d never noticed it in Missouri. But it’s found throughout the continent. I have to include the caveat that it’s listed as a noxious weed in much of the West. Introduced for gardens, it spreads rapidly in open habitats like rangeland, competing with native plants for space. Not to mention that cattle don’t like its taste. But on the roadsides of our neighborhood in the damp Northeast, I don’t find it to be too aggressive, just resilient to mowing and trampling. It’s also known as “butter and eggs,” which I think describes its pale colors perfectly. Bumblebees and sweat bees pollinate it, so despite its noxious drawbacks, it’s not without benefits to certain species.
While this picture comes from a nice grassland patch, I usually see toadflax in much rougher spots. In the extreme environment of a crumbling bit of “lawn” between a sidewalk and a drugstore parking lot, mowed and leaf-blown to oblivion, there are few plants that can survive. Toadflax manages to keep blooming there from May to November. Gotta hand it to them.
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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.