Winter has its unique beauty. We try to capture its essence in picture, poem and song but it must be experienced to be appreciated – and respected. One can be transfixed by such beauty and one can be frozen solid by its cold, which I suppose is another way of being transfixed.

I lost Winter some time ago when Raynaud’s Syndrome came to teach me patience, much of which I’ve not yet learned. The tiny capillaries in fingers and toes spasm into circulatory non-compliance. My hands and feet grow icy, though it feels like they’re all aflame. Hot blood, but frozen like a stone.

But I can remember Winter of my own ‘olden days.’ And I can re-capture some of the beauty and the memories of times in which I could fully appreciate the wonder of the White Season.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, wife of a Canadian Presbyterian minister, both now long gone, an author and poet in her own right (she wrote the Anne of Green Gables books), captured the mood and measure of Winter in her poem, A Winter Day. Following are excerpts:

Wide, sparkling fields snow-vestured lie
Beneath a blue, unshadowed sky;

A glistening splendor crowns the woods
And bosky, whistling solitudes;

In hemlock glen and reedy mere
The tang of frost is sharp and clear . . .

The video underscore is from an old Christmas Carol: 'In the Bleak Mid Winter', written by Christina Rossetti

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.