Loss is in the air. Summer’s juicy verdure gives way to something crisped and husky. The colors dull and the plants fuzz, release last seed, go black. There’s something cruel about it. On a plane some years ago, the stranger strapped in next to me talked about winter in Chicago. “You never been to Chicago in winter?” he said. “I’ve never been to Chicago,” I said. “Well we got a wind so cold we call it the hawk,” he said. It sounded like a mean thing.
Heat slips off, chased by the hawk, and the smolder has to come from within. Winter makes us know the hollows. Darkness creeps in from both sides and pushes us to that pure ridge, all the way exposed. Peer over, scope the abyss. The fear is ancient, part of our human-animal inheritance, the surging fury of survival: will I be warm enough, will I have enough to eat, will it keep getting darker, will the darkness swallow me, will it swallow us all together?
For the Paris Review, I’m writing a four-part series about the Winter Solstice. The first part asks, what’s death in a world of stories?