I’ve just walked down to the library and back. My umbrella, for the limited amount of rain it kept off my head, told me that the wind is changing. Well, that and the obvious fact that it’s fifteen degrees colder than yesterday. We stand on the verge of winter; a token, introductory inch of snow is forecast for tonight.

I’m conflicted about winter. I love the snow, the cold, the piled layers of clothes, the invitation to revisit that interior “burly, infant spot” as Merton calls it. But something about winter makes me fearful. Perhaps I am loathe to trust what lies beneath—both without and within. Will life re-emerge? Or is there a larger more frightening truth in C.S. Lewis’s earliest Narnia scenes where the witch has the country locked into the dim reality of “always winter and never Christmas?”

More on that on some dim, post-Christmas, winter day. Today is the day before Thanksgiving, it’s only raining, I’m inside, warm and dry, an eclectic stack of unread books awaits me, the house smells of the feast to come, and I am very thankful for all of it.