“How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no winter in our year!”

— Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “April Days,” 1861

Tis strange weather we’ve been having, unusual for this time of year, even going so far as to set records in some places. Prior to Dec. 22, I had to keep reminding myself that, yes, it was still only autumn, so fretting about the mild damp days was a bit incongruous and excessive. Now that we are several days into what we officially deem the winter season, I feel that my opinions on the matter are a bit more apropos and relevant. For isn’t this the time when the ground should be white or at least silver, with tree and shrub picking up the color scheme and the sky matching our mood?

It occurs to me how much less we might long for spring were it not for winter. After all, humans depend a great deal upon comparisons in order to make up their minds about various things, not the least of which is how much more preferable it is to hear robins singing and see them pulling worms out of lawns than it is listening to the wind howl and watching the snow swirling into waist-high drifts. But would we love spring as much were it not for the dark days of winter we must all pass through before coming out into its April and May fresh new greenness?

It seems to me that winter gives us pause, compels us to slow down and savor the small things we miss when our gaze is turned outwardly toward field and wood, toward lake and hill and beach, toward warm days and muggy nights. The colder months provide us with the challenges that make us better appreciate their ending, make of it more a celebration than simply a transition. For who does not feel like cheering once the snow starts melting from the warming earth more readily, other than perhaps the owners of ski resorts?

I’ve never lived where there isn’t any winter, where it is spring and summer almost year-round, and where autumn is, at best, a negligible event. My southern friends thank me profusely for posting photos online of October’s splendor, and one friend even asked if I could get and post a few shots of the ice-covered rocks along the shoreline in January, as she’s always missed seeing that since moving to Florida many years ago. I wondered then just what is the benefit, aesthetic or otherwise, of living where the seasons are simply something that appear on calendars or note cards and where heat and glaring sunlight is the order most days. Sure, they never have to shovel snow or deal with ice that brings power lines down and cuts the power off. But they have meteorological events of their own that I’d be loathe to experience, so in the end, it all averages out. Still, I would not want to forfeit the beauties of a northern spring, summer, fall, and yes, even winter for 365 days of heat and the same eternal topography with nothing much else to hope for.

I suspect that my own appreciation of nature might be considerably lessened were I not able to experience this anticipation each year, if leaves were green year-round and the late December sky were not the stage for the year’s most spectacular sunsets. That said, I do understand why some people choose to leave this all behind. But the price for me would be too great, and besides, I’m a cool-weather person, and one who would rather look forward to relief from intense heat than to have it be the norm from which the only escape is air conditioning.

One of the bonuses of living in northern temperate regions is to experience the blessed anticipation of witnessing the earth green up again in spring, of feeling like one is indeed part of the process, if only as a bystander or one who delights in putting seed to soil as early as is feasibly possible. If those efforts of planting too early prove futile, there is a lesson to be learned from that, among the many that nature teaches, or tries to. And that is patience, that virtue that can be so hard to come by, particular once spring’s influences begin to make themselves felt through the ever-persistent daylight and that certain something in the air.

Winter is the time here when many of our virtues are tested, humility among them. For what is more humbling than a storm that slows our lives to a crawl and that cannot be overcome but simply accepted as a fact of the season? Power outages also test our mettle and cause us to realize the preciousness of resources we take for granted until we are deprived of them. And once again, patience comes into play, or should, as we wait it out, in the faith that it won’t last forever and that there will soon be a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, if not above the tree line itself.

In all her manifestations, nature teaches, from the slow but steady deliberateness of a sprout unfurling beneath the soil to the way ice crystals create incomparable ferny patterns on our windows in January. And as fast and furiously as some winter storms come upon us this time of year, there was a process to that, too, as nature’s forces gathered above a solid mass of gloomy-day clouds before unleashing their ferocity upon us.

Nothing is rushed in nature, and as just one member of her vast family, I have finally learned that good things do come to those of us who wait, to those of us who have, at long last, achieved the patience that is denied the young and who don’t mind weathering a storm, be it literal or metaphorical. In the end, the reward, in the form of nature’s beauty, no matter what the season, will have made it well worth the wait.

— Rachel Lovejoy, a freelance writer living in Saco who enjoys exploring the woods of southern Maine, can be reached via email at rachell1950@hotmail.com.