Home, Winter: An Old Story

Dec. 31, 2023

Dangling as we are this moment between two holidays, one of which is Merry and the other Happy, when corks are popping and people are festively clinking glasses, I hesitate to write the story of the sad, swollen river, follow it to its source, name its existence. 

The New Year!  A time for reflection and resolution about betterment and brighter futures.  A time to make up one’s mind to exercise more, gobble vegetables not cookies, reduce screen time, be nicer to the neighbors. The papers are filled with cheerful lists of the best books of 2023, or the best movies or the most popular recipes. 

Cheerful. Happy New Year!  Clink, clink. 

But the river, the river flowing inside my body, just below my smile, my gratitude. I can hear it, like sad piano chords echoing in the dark sky.  But that river is not just a metaphor for there are sad, swollen rivers all over Maine. Roads washed out from last weekend’s storm will take weeks and months to be repaired. It rained Christmas morning, and it has rained every day this week. Our dirt road is a river of mud, mud that sucks at the tires and spews itself into the air.  It’s so warm the lawn is still May-green. There are no frozen ponds, no snowmen. 

We have lost winter. Winter as it used to be when I was a child and when my children were growing up is gone. Now their children are splashing in puddles, not riding to the top of Saddleback Mountain on a chair lift, their skies dangling under them, noble mountain peaks dressed in their finest snow cover shimmering before them. 

This muddy Christmas is not a one-off.  The planet entered uncharted territory this year with the heat records that have been set.  There is no going back. The only question being debated by scientists is whether this year’s record is a sign the climate crisis is accelerating or not.  James Hensen, the scientist with the longest and most respected track record of predicting climate change, wrote last year that these temperatures are a sure sign of this acceleration. 

But as Bill McKibben notes in his recent essay “An Odd Silence”:

The world—its politics, its economy, and its journalism—has trouble coping with the scale of the climate crisis. We can’t quite wrap our collective head around it, which has never been clearer to me than in these waning days of 2023.

Because the most important thing that happened this year was the heat. By far. It was hotter than it has been in at least 125,000 years on this planet. Every month since May was the hottest ever recorded. Ocean temperatures set a new all-time mark, over 100 degrees. Canada burned, filling the air above our cities with smoke.

And yet you really wouldn’t know it from reading the wrap-ups of the year’s news now appearing on one website after another.

McKibben’s observation that the press isn’t talking about the biggest news of the year is interesting in light of my own initial reluctance to write about this news and its impact on me for fear it would make you turn away, reader.  We aren’t a culture that supports reflection on scarcity, on loss, on regret, on fear. We are optimists with stories about ever widening frontiers of possibility and progress and mastery.    

But we must face these new truths about ourselves and our planet.  It’s here. We done it. Terrible planet altering heat. It isn’t going away. Here in Maine, we will have some snow sometime and we will likely have a frozen pond again but rarely will we have what Billy Collins calls in the poem Snow Day, “a revolution of snow.” 

Snow Day
BY BILLY COLLINS
Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,   
its white flag waving over everything,
the landscape vanished,
not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,   
and beyond these windows

the government buildings smothered,
schools and libraries buried, the post office lost   
under the noiseless drift,
the paths of trains softly blocked,
the world fallen under this falling.

Cold, snow, ice: it chiseled our souls here in Maine, made us proud of our sturdiness, erased life’s burdens for a day, transformed our porches and front yards into magical places. Our loss of winter as we once knew it has happened so quickly, we haven’t yet the language or the muscle to deal with it. Oh, the sadness and right beside it the nostalgia!  Nostalgia: from the Greek work nostos ‘return home’ and ‘algos’, meaning pain.  

This year the ordinary nostalgia some of us have for long ago holidays peopled with Aunts and Uncles and Grandparents who patted us on the head and sang off-tune is accompanied by a whole new yearning for what we once took for granted here at home: cold oceans filled with cod and squirming with shrimp, mountains arraigned in white shawls, lakes festooned with ice fishing shacks, snowdays, the deep quiet at the heart of a blizzard. 

Home as we know it, here and all over the planet, is now so altered, so threatened, so unpredictable, that it is fair to say that we will never go home again.  On the deepest level of attachment, we are spun off, walking precariously through a psychologically disturbed terrain, a place full of anxiety and loss and uncertainty.  

I think we must acknowledge where we are if we are to change as quickly as we need to change.  That was my work as a therapist: to acknowledge the crippling influence of holding on to old stories and to find new stories to guide people towards new solutions and a greater sense of choice and agency. 

But none of this can be done alone, which is why I write to you all this morning. Just as in my professional life people look to me for acknowledgement of their pain, I too need acknowledgement, need to be part of a community of people who feel and speak the pain of loss and the yearning for a lost home.  

But once spoken and acknowledged, the work is not over. From that place of truthful seeing and sorrow speaking we can together fashion new stories about home, about how we need to live in this home in ways that respect the needs of this place called Earth.  We have all the answers for how to do this, we have all the science to back it up.

And we have the stories right under our feet. Not thousands of miles away but here, right here on this very land, Indigenous people cared for this land for 11,000 years in ways that acknowledged the rights of the birch and the white pines, the sweetgrass and cod, the rivers and the saltmarshes to respect and health. If we listen closely enough, we can learn from their stories and live lives filled with generosity, interconnection, care and respect. 

So I say to you, reader, dare to speak your longing for winter, real winter. Dare to say that your home as you came to know and love it is gone, that this frightens you and brings you great sadness. We don’t like to face loss in this country.  We were born in optimism and boundlessness.  And we believed this everlasting bounty was God’s will for us.  These are old stories. Our old stories brought great destruction and will bring even more if we don’t change them quickly. 

For a New Years resolution, I urge you to become a story teller, to dare to tell the truth about what is happening to our home. To break the rules.  Being nice will only get us all up that proverbial creek!!

In gratitude to all of you, readers, who dare to read this and dare to bear witness to the sad rivers flowing here and wherever you call home.