Going Indoors with Katherine May’s Wintering

The first frost the other day made me think about the season of going indoors and wrapping up outdoors. Outside, it’s a season of seeing our breath float into the air and hearing the white-edged grass crunch under our feet, but I’m aware there’s such a different pattern of being indoors.

I’m interested in the disparity between the floating that we can do alone in a house and the earthy, muscular work of tending a garden. I’m curious how these two states coexist, with the gardener putting agapanthus to bed one moment and the next picking up odd screws, cleaning sprays, books laid open on their spines. Stuff seems to flow into our houses like a tide that’s come in and the endless sorting they require causes a kind of fog to come over us. Life out of doors isn’t beset with the same thinginess that houses are and I suppose that’s part of the attraction, a chance to be without things, to be diminished, and thereby, paradoxically, enlarged. It’s the sensation that we have standing at the top of a mountain, the exhilaration of feeling small in a heavenly landscape.

As we walk toward winter, I’m remembering the book Wintering by Katherine May. I read it last winter and I was struck by how she reframed winter as a season of rest and retreat, not in a sentimental way, but as a robust response to the demands of heady summers and fruit-laden harvests. It’s something we have perhaps become culturally averse to, but I was struck by the physicality of winter after reading May’s book. Rather than holding a candle for the longer days to come, winter in May’s eyes is a season that is about being embodied, about listening to the body and the land, through the darkest nights of the year.