By Kat Privett
The Earth tilts toward its southernmost point in its elliptical orbit at Winter Solstice. We, therefore, are spinning away from the sun, rather than the alternative — although, from our point of view, it is the sun that appears to have slowed and lowered in the sky. The Latin word solstitium (the origin of “solstice”) translates to “sun standing still.”
For as long as I can remember, I have forgotten the color green when winter settles her bony fingers against the ground. Even the cedars and pines, jostling for attention along my driveway, have lost that battle with my memory when temperatures fall below anything bearable. Swaths of brown and gray wash across my mind’s eye, shrouding the verdant grasses of only a few months prior. This was the nature of grief, I remember thinking, this theft of hue that pressed into the farm and forced me to the crackle of a wood-burning stove.
But it wasn’t the only shift that rattled me.
When the nights became cool, it would begin: a lone toad croaking in the bramble, an owl contemplating a hunt. These were solitary songs, unaccompanied by cicadas, as October gave way to the long night ahead. The buzz and hum of all things green had begun their sleep, and I knew the absence of their cadence would soon become all that I could hear. There was a depth to it that threatened to swallow me whole. And it was ironic, I thought, that I was compelled to trudge alongside the evergreens while the rest of the woods became so very, very still. No matter how I rallied, winter just wasn’t my season.
Each year as the Earth nodded against her axis, angling for 25.3 degrees, I evaded that muted and colorless world with everything in me. It was death, limping across what had once been magical, and I wanted no part of it. In those months, I sought the comfort of my hearth, banking the fire every morning to suspend the smoldering coals for the chill to come. There was such a strange apricity within them. Life vibrated there, insulated and safe, waiting to ignite with the smallest whisper of air. Every evening, the flame would return: sputtering at first, then lapping against walls of iron in a satisfying whoosh. It was belligerent, that gasp of oxygen and hope, a coup against the apathy of December. The sun may have forgotten me, but here were the embers of her, smuggled from the graveyards of Jack Frost.
It was somewhat of a consolation.
And so, as a dedicated thermophile, I rarely planted a winter garden. Rather, I studied my seed catalogs, measuring time in an almost brumation state, and waited for Winter Solstice. It was the shortest day of the year, occurring just before Christmas Eve. As the descent into that Eventide yawned its hours across the Northern Hemisphere, there were twinkle lights and candles, bubbling soups and silver ribbons to fill them. These were the talismans that I gathered around me as I mourned the loss of the sun, the glowing things that warded against the ice outside of my window. How I resented the duties of the farm as night came earlier and earlier, slipping across the yard in bolts of crunch and bluster. Still, there were heaters to check, high tunnel walls to lower, and pipes to cover when a deep freeze encroached across Central Alabama. Rather rude, I thought, that uninvited Northern wind showing up without a casserole. But there she would be, uppity and unrelenting, whenever the farm called for my attention after dark.
One such evening, on a run to secure a chicken coop, something rustled overhead and halted my feet. Turkey buzzards, I assumed, as they tended to roost in the mulberry tree, far from the neighbor’s shotgun blasts. And so, I looked up. Between the branches, a waxing gibbous caught my eye, reflecting the remnants of the sun. Indigo retreated from its halo, and everything in its path was gifted a shadow.
And there, in the clearing of the woods, was solstice. There, the critters and croakers of summer were not muzzled: they were slumbering, waiting, leaning into life in such a way that assumed sanctuary. It was a trust fall, of sorts, and in that moment, I stopped fighting winter. After all, it was only the space where green rested, where the songs of it hushed long enough to take in breath. It was a pause, a prayer, and one that my most beloved star could not resist. I was familiar with the science behind the sun’s perceived descent on this eve, how its position would appear incredibly still.
It’s an astrological phenomenon, one that my father had waxed long about during a visit in 2001 as I shivered in the yard. It had become his habit to drag his grown children into the dark, especially in the days before Christmas, to ponder the stars. This is the night that the sun considers herself, he said as I shuffled from one foot to the next, even she knows to be still before running back across the sky. And it ran right past me. I lost the gift of that moment, the crystalline sharpness of his last solstice in the woods, that introspection of a life that had paused — for just a moment — to contemplate the stars. It is with deep regret that I cannot remember what happened next, if anything happened at all. But I can still see him there, the cop whose face became soft against the cold, his breath anchored upon a windless evening as if it could remain still in time.
Somehow, it did.
