This piece of music by the Danish String Quartet is titled ‘The Peat Dance’ and it recalls a windy day in Ireland when I was in some tour group marching across the peat bogs, pausing in a peat-thatched cottage for some Irish coffee to take the sting out of the cold. Humans are funny in the ways we walk through winter together, and apart. 

Suzie enjoys the Danish String Quartet, and we are currently in the midst of planning for a dinner loosely called ‘Suzette’s Feast’ in an homage to ‘Babette’s Feast’. Ours will likely be a sad and silly approximation of the wonder that was Babette’s glorious meal (Suzie has already nixed the turtle soup, and I haven’t been able to locate any quails to stuff – we are having Mom do up some Cornish game hens for the latter) but this is how we traverse the final weeks of winter. Together. 

Hope is on the swiftly-moving air currents (a clumsily-disguised description of wind because I’m tired of saying that word). It’s in the shift of the sun, and the disappearing hour this weekend. It’s also in the burst of new growth on our indoor plants – a sign that comes before the snow has melted, before the first cranky and crinkled unfolding of the Lenten rose. 

This is a fern that we’ve had since I first met Andy – a descendant of one of his Mom’s original plants – and somehow we’ve managed to keep it alive for twenty-five years. It’s in our sunniest window (and if you’re having trouble with ferns, I advise trying them in a bit more light – when the literature says they can survive in deep shade, that usually means the deep shade of the outdoors – indoors is by its very nature already shaded). This fern, like most of us, has had good years and bad years, and right now it’s looking very lush and happy, thanks to a prime spot right beside the humidifier. Ferns always like high humidity, especially in bright light. 

I sense spring in its verdant new growth. Promise, too. 

Another winter song to see us through the dimmest days, when being poised on the precipice of spring makes the icy setbacks that much more difficult to bear. I’ve often been called cold, or detached, and I always sort of wore that as a badge of pride. Better to be cold than to be hurt. Better to strike first than have your heart pierced and your life marred forever after. What a foolish attitude to have, or in my case to pretend. A song now for the supposedly-cold-hearted among us:

Come to me
Run to me
Do and be done with me
Cold, cold, cold
Don’t I exist for you?
Don’t I still live for you?
Cold, cold, cold

From the same exquisite album that brought us this winter song, ‘Cold’ was an ideal companion piece, a delicate ballad that gently ticks off a list of adoration and celebration of someone who may or may not be into you. The first person who gave me this song loved me more than I could ever love her. She probably still does. My heart remains icily indifferent. 

Everything I possess, given with tenderness
Wrapped in a ribbon of glass
Time it may take us but God only knows
How I’ve paid for those things in the past

Dying is easy it’s living that scares me to death, ooh, yeah
I could be so content hearing the sound of your breath, ooh, yeah

Cold is the colour of crystal the snowlight
That falls from the heavenly skies
Catch me and let me dive under
For I want to swim in the pools of your eyes

I wanna be with you baby
Oh-oh, slip me inside of your heart
Don’t I belong to you baby?
Don’t you know that nothing can tear us apart?
Come on now, come on now, come on now
Telling you that
I loved you right from the start
But the more I want you the less I get
Ain’t that just the way things are?

Sometimes it’s difficult to muster up much compassion for our younger selves, for the people we once were who didn’t know any better, or who did but simply never acted on it. The clarity of how those aspects differ is something we never want to admit. How much easier on our conscience would it be to just pretend confusion, to act like we never knew we were doing the wrong thing? I always knew, and to my shameful acknowledgment, I did the awful things anyway. When shielding the heart, you run the risk of wounding others with your armor, and at a certain point that risk became a reward. The warped masochistic tendencies of a young man lost in the turmoil of not knowing who he was – the casualties left on love’s battlefield – the coldness, the precision, the detachment… 

The sake of survival. 

Winter has frozen us
Let love take hold of us
(Cold, cold, cold)
Now we are shivering
Blue ice is glittering
(Cold, cold, cold)

Cold is the colour of crystal the snowlight
That falls from the heavenly skies
Catch me and let me dive under
For I want to swim in the pools of your eyes

In this the year that I turn fifty years old, I find myself indulging in bits of nostalgia here and there, something I don’t do all that often mostly because of how messy it can be. I look back at some pictures where my smile is big and my outfits ridiculous, anything to disguise and distract from the bandages on my wrists, and I ache for what we do to ourselves just trying to get through it. For some reason, these recent days have returned my mind to my senior year of high school, an eerie echo of another transitional period of life. Winter music put my youth to slumber then; it breaks my middle age now. 

We are the roses in the garden,
Beauty with thorns among our leaves.

To pick a rose you ask your hands to bleed.
What is the reason for having roses
When your blood is shed carelessly?

It must be for something more than vanity.

‘Our Time in Eden’ is one of those formative music albums of my youth, thanks to epic cuts like ‘These Are Days’ and ‘Candy Everybody Wants’ – and this one – ‘Eden’ – which is one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard, in the best possible way. Back in those final days of high school, I felt the quickened rush of time – the clock as another demon – and I struggled to hang onto whatever I could even as I felt it all slipping away. Most of my classmates and friends wanted to grow up as quickly as possible – despite how old my soul felt, or perhaps because of it, I understood that we should not have been in such a rush, that those days, that Eden, would never come again. I didn’t want to let it go. 

Believe me, the truth is we’re not honest,
Not the people that we dream.

We’re not as close as we could be.
Willing to grow but rains are shallow.
Barren and wind-scattered seed on stone and dry land,

We will be.
Waiting for the light arisen
To flood inside the prison.

And in that time kind words alone will teach us,
No bitterness will reach us.

Whenever I hear this song, it makes me pause and remember. There’s a pit in my stomach – not the usual angst-ridden pit, but a stirring of great and overwhelming emotion. It brings back that tender time when the world was first imprinting itself on my soul, when music meant so much, when beauty could break the heart and the first flush of romantic love hinted at all the exquisite torment to come. Had I known everything that would unfold, I wonder if I’d have bothered with the bandages at all, or simply embraced the pain, knowing how integral it would be to finding the happiness. 

Reason will be guided another way.
All in time,
But the clock is another demon that devours our time in eden,
In our paradise.
Will our eyes see well beneath us,
Flowers all divine?
Is there still time?
If we wake and discover
In life a precious love,
Will that waking become more heavenly?

The last few weeks of winter are always the toughest. They require music that is both somber and bordering on hope, something that soothes the soul and quells the restless heart. One of the best albums for this is Annie Lennox’s magnificent ‘Diva’, which became the soundtrack to the last winter of my high school years.

How many times do I have to try to tell you
That I’m sorry for the things I’ve done,
But when I start to try to tell you
That’s when you have to tell me
Hey… this kind of trouble’s only just begun

During that winter, I was just starting to feel the pangs of leaving our youth behind, and with the very real sense of such impending loss suddenly some of our lifelong grudges softened a bit. One of our teachers pointed out the phenomenon, explaining that it happened to most seniors, before trailing off wistfully. She seemed as moved as I was at that moment, when understanding and realization aligned with a rare recognizance of growth at the exact instant it happened. 

I told myself too many times
Why don’t you ever learn to keep your big mouth shut
That’s why it hurts so bad to hear the words
That keep on falling from your mouth
Falling from your mouth
Falling from your mouth
Tell me
Why…

I may be mad
I may be blind
I may be viciously unkind
But I can still read what you’re thinking

And I’ve heard is said too many times
That you’d be better off
Besides…
Why can’t you see this boat is sinking
(This boat is sinking this boat is sinking)

The end of winter is an icy space. A frigid place. It trends toward the thaw of spring, but at its heart it remains frozen. Those first days of melting, when the heat of the sun is enough to finally cut through the snow, there are cracks and fissures, especially when the nights freeze everything again. The push and pull of this time wears on the strongest of us. 

Let’s go down to the water’s edge
And we can cast away those doubts
Some things are better left unsaid
But they still turn me inside out
Turning inside out, turning inside out
Tell me
Why…
Tell me
Why…

When those last of that winter’s days began to dovetail with the very beginning of the last of my high school days, this was the music that saw me through the tender time. We were just starting to write the stories that would become our own history books of life – the first chapters of whatever was about to unfurl. I put mine down literally, a practice I’ve maintained through this very moment. 

This is the book I never read
These are the words I never said
This is the path I’ll never tread
These are the dreams I’ll dream instead
This is the joy that’s seldom spread
These are the tears…
The tears we shed
This is the fear
This is the dread

These are the contents of my head
And these are the years that we have spent
And this is what they represent
And this is how I feel
Do you know how I feel?
‘Cause I don’t think you know how I feel
I don’t think you know what I feel

I don’t think you know what I feel
You don’t know what I feel