Winter Solstice

For Dana, Christmas 2007

Chickadees swoop and dive, then hide coyly amidst the cedar's icy branches.
The wind rattles, sends eddies of snow careening like white tornadoes
across the yard. Nearby, the brook that raged last spring lies frozen.

Months ago, these same birds soared in summer's glory, arrived early
each morning to beat the August sun. Their songs filled our house
with sweet breakfast music. Gold and purple finches, wintering now
in Florida or California, added then to the summer rainbow outside our kitchen.
Day after day, these timid visitors had their fill, then flew off, perhaps to some
shady glen, only to return, as if for cocktails, in late afternoon.

Our days passed in similar leisure, rising with the sun to sip coffee and juice
and mark the feathered newcomers on a calendar filled with notes of trips
on foot, by sea, up mountains, through forests. An endless array of sun-soaked days
and evening choruses of crickets and peepers. We harvested, too, from vine-ripened
tomatoes and sweet succulent lettuce. So much bounty, so much beauty.
A cardinal alights, now, on a snow-covered feeder, her buff-brown tail flicking
to the beat of some distant avian chorus, her orange beak pecking away
at sunflower seeds. She turns her head left and right, its jaunty plume erect
but ruffled in the wind. Bits of husk fall to the snow. Her magenta mate watches
from a nearby branch, then dives toward her, driving her from her perch.
She acquiesces, content to scavenge from the seeds he scatters.

Now, as the solstice approaches, we begin the upward climb through winter
to another spring, another summer, another autumn. We kiss good-by
on frigid mornings, return in darkness to woodstove warmth. Night after night,
we nest beneath quilts, taking pleasure in the comfort of bodies folded together.
While chickadees and cardinals fill themselves at winter feeders,
we sustain each other with a love that deepens with each passing season.