The Icy Corridors of Winter
These roses, here because of my partner’s recent birthday and cantilevering from their vase out over the table, are still making a statement days later. Some lines from the poem Flowers by Linda Pastan are relevant.
The deep strangeness
of flowers in winter —
…unnatural
as makeup on a child.
It’s freezing all around us —
salt cold on the lips,
the flinty blacks and grays
of January in any northern city,
and flowers
everywhere:
in the supermarket
by cans of juice,
…notched tulips, crimson
and pink, ablaze
in the icy
corridors of winter.
How extravagantly beautiful flowers in winter really are and I’m grateful to have that pointed out.
I work in a grocery store and it’s so easy to just walk by them day after working day and not really notice. Assertive, in- your-face colors, defying winter. In the produce section, where they are merchandised, there is much care taken to provide what are called “color breaks” to emphasize each member of the ensemble. Not too many reds together, not too many greens or yellows in a row. So there are cucumbers, then peppers, then Japanese eggplant, maybe yellow summer squash.
People crave light and color and smell and life. I realize there is an environmental cost underwriting this extravagance in food miles and flower miles. We should not have tulips or roses in New England in January, or asparagus from Chile either, but here they are.
And it’s easy to stop seeing them, easy not to notice after a while.
There it is again, it’s all about what you notice. What you’re trained to notice, what you notice by proclivity or habit. I want to notice everything, but I’d be overwhelmed, overstimulated and unable to use all the info.
I notice all the toddlers coming through the store who look about my granddaughter’s age and I have to chat up whoever the adult is, asking how old the child is and what they’re doing. I really want to talk about my little Alicia in Sweden and how she turned one in August and how she looks into the camera when we have video chats. Before her, I can’t say I paid much attention to children that age. It’s been a long while since I had one.
It’s like popping a better lens into place. There’s some kind of correspondence between what one notices and being grateful.
Yesterday was the day traditionally known as Epiphany, the end of the Christmas holiday. It’s not one we pay much attention to in the US, but it is not without relevance for those of us involved in the Inquiry Into a Gratitude-Inspired Life. Author James Joyce it was who gave us the secular meaning of epiphany, which is “the revelation of the whatness of a thing, the moment when the soul of the commonest object […] seems to us radiant.”
A portal to gratitude, pure and simple, and an aching, longing, perhaps, for the transcendent, breathtaking mysteries all around us. An invitation to notice, to remember, to simply say thank you for all the colors in the icy corridors of winter.
