Winter World: a Common Read at ACS

This reader writes:

    I have spent much of the past week outside for a few hours each day; going through the annual motions of deer hunting. For me, it is mainly trying to see and stalk a deer as closely as I can; kind of like counting coup among Native Americans.

    Between my stalking and walking, I have seen the season descend from color and movement into stillness and white. Things really tightened up this weekend as cold became true winter-cold: ice started edging around the shallow clay pond, and the forsaken goldenrod, now rusty and crisp, was easily trampled by the wind and the weather and me.

    Yet great crowds of geese, evidently immune to the biting wind, filled the bend of river in front of our house; shouting and carousing like football fans. Red squirrels still emerged from their battlements to heap me with insults, and flights of chickadees, when the sun broke through, looped and laced withing the brambles.

    But from the great forked oak in the middle of the field, stillness reigned as far as I could see.  Still, I know now that underneath the ground and within the tree trunks, in burrows, nests, and lodges, between boughs and under water a thousand tiny engines, as singular and miraculous as Wilson Bentley’s snowflakes, flutter, fade, or freeze - to keep a spark for Spring.