Winters in New England

Winters in New England go on forever. The cold settles so far inside you that no quilt or down vest or hissing radiator can shake it loose. You're cold, and the world is blurred by the layers of ice on the windows. A cloudless January taunts you with a blinding, frigid sun.

It starts around Thanksgiving and goes on until April. Sometimes it snows in May



Spring in New England is amazing. After the long assault of winter, the air becomes warm and fragrant. The sun coaxes a million buds from the trees and that skeletal gray landscape is suddenly littered with iridescent yellow-green, the coltish color of a world reborn. The skies thaw, turn plush and black with rain. Lilacs pour upon one another, imbue the air around them with the scent of a season indulging itself.

Everyone's horny in the spring. Bodies emerge from layers of down. People make eye contact instead of tucking in against the cold. You're at ease with the world, eager to join in that hum of living things. Every stray thought is buttressed by the promiscuous glee of nature. The sun lingers on your skin and whets your appetite for another body. The rich green smell of the air has the heady nose of her excitement, that sticky wet smell of her when she's naked beneath you.

Then one day it's summer. The gentle warmth of spring catches fire overnight and you head for the beach. Revere Beach at the edge of the city. The women are uncomplicated, and Kelly's serves up a lobster roll like nobody else. Or head north past Gloucester, out through Ipswich to Crane Beach. Over the dunes and into the breeze off the bay. Pull into Woodman's for fried clams and beer on the way home. Catch the ferry to Provincetown for the day. Park down the road from the ranger and walk through the night to the far side of Walden Pond, drop your clothes on the shore and glide through the dark water.

Sometime in September, you notice how the days are getting shorter, how the afternoons start to cool off a little earlier. Yellow starts to creep into the trees. The clear blue afternoons of Indian Summer interrupt the slide in temperature for a week or two, but then a week of cold rain strips the trees, and the descent into winter is on.



The first snow is a reprieve from the austerity. One afternoon a sky nearly low as the rooftops starts dropping a few flakes. That dead air of a cold season is suddenly decorated with the soft patter of falling snow. The whole space outside your window gathers momentum: as far as you can see down the streets and sidewalks the air is humming quietly with the falling geometry of snowflakes. Moisture crystallizes in the cold air, draws the cold into itself and spins downward, piles on the gardens and window sills. By evening, the hard lines of a city are lost under the rolling landscape of snow. Traffic crawls, and the noise of rush hour is muted. Time is undone by the weather and the city becomes a postcard from a century before.

You fall asleep to the pat of snowflakes against the windows, and wake up to the luminous transformation of every tree branch and rooftop, every hedge and porch rail. The sky has snowed out but hovers like gray batting overhead, mutes the daylight and lets you gaze wide eyed at a world tuned white.

Maybe your footsteps are the first ones down the walk, the first tracks in the new wilderness of your neighborhood. If you're out early, you can hear the squeak of each footprint, the groan and cracking of the trees under the weight of the storm.

And then you hear the grating of a snowplow against the pavement, the hiss of salt and cinders. Cars are buried to their windows in the wake of the plow, and when you dig yours out, you mark the spot with lawn chairs, or a big two-by-four across a couple garbage cans. By afternoon, those drifts along the curbs are black with ash and freezing in place.

Any day above 32 and the crosswalks are submerged in the melt. The snow starts to slush, then turns to ice overnight.

The next storm compounds the crud, and the romance of winter is hurried away on the jet stream. January is bitter and unforgiving, and you're left to dream of temperatures ascending into the teens.


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