Originally printed in the January/February 2024 edition of Down Country Roads Magazine

Winter. It really sets in after the Christmas season has drifted past, after the festivities have waned away. Usually, January is when the temperatures permanently settle into their winterish lows, and we forget the autumn and forget the spring and all that’s left is winter.

The short days seem shorter still. The skies, heavy with snow or icy blue, outline the skeletons of trees in the shelterbelts, and the sentinel ponderosas standing resolute on the ridgelines of the forest.

Snow crunches underfoot, and there is no give in the ground. Dams freeze, stock tanks freeze. All is rock hard. Dead sprigs are all that remain of summer gardens, with the plants sleeping snugly out of sight, unconcerned for what’s above.

And everything is cold.

The cows are cold, standing with their backs to the wind. The horses are cold, following suit, while the chickens sulk with abandon, staring at their food and refusing to leave the coop. Even the dogs, usually so eager to escape in the morning, hesitate when the world outside is cloaked in white. We don layer upon layer to armor up against the winter, dreaming of when we can walk about without coveralls and long underwear and sweatshirts over sweatshirts impeding every action. Out we tumble in the morning, with only our eyes visible, maybe our noses, stumbling down to the barn and the chicken coop and the tractor and the corrals, fumbling with mittened, cold-bitten fingers while our toes freeze in our boots.

And it is about halfway through January’s bleakness that I start remembering why springtime is such a welcome relief, and why people dislike the winter.

And so winter goes. The festivity of Christmastime gone, the excitement of the New Year behind us, the winter drags by, sleepy, depressed, and frostbitten.

But there is another side of winter, if we can see past the thermometer and the frozen fingers.

Under the biting cold is an energy. In between snowstorms. In between days of gale-force winds. A slumbering energy, ready to burst out in joyful excitement. There is an invigorating beauty, if one knows where to look. If one chooses to look.

It’s in the horses running fresh and free in a falling snow. It’s in the dogs dashing through drift after deep, new drift, gleeful against the cold. It’s in the whirling snowflakes of a snowglobe snowfall, and the silence of a winter night under a starry sky.

How do we miss those things?

It’s the acrobatics of chickadees at the birdfeeder.

It’s the first set of footprints in a fresh snow. Or the tiniest of tiny tracks between clumps of grass, evidence of the littlest of lives at work.

The hilarious energy of the pups when they’ve been inside too long, minutes before they are kicked out again.

It’s the fire in the fingers as they warm around a mug of coffee. It’s the frosty windowpanes, those amazingly intricate flowers that only grow in winter. It’s in the crystal-clear sound of a morning glazed over. It’s in the blue-sky, springlike days that punctuate our South Dakota winters. It’s in the clouds of warm breath from every nostril, and frost-covered backs of our black angus cows, when the wind isn’t blowing and their natural furnaces have made them comfortable. 

It’s the glittering brilliance of fresh snow under a cold, waking sunrise, or under a full moon.

It’s the blue hues in the white landscape, the purples and pinks that are in every drift, every shadow, the subtle glaze of color that is anything but stark white. It is the strange and exquisite shapes chiseled into the snow, and the beautiful music of a melt-off.

Deep in winter, it is that kind of energy, that kind of excitement. Deep in winter, those glimpses of beauty so profound, against which spring in all its glory pales.

After all, winter doesn’t last forever.