What Winter Knows

The thing about winter is that it's honest. No leaves to hide behind. No flowers to distract you. Just the architecture of things— the bones of the oak, the real shape of the hill, the distance between houses you never noticed when everything was green. Winter strips the set and shows you the stage. I used to hate it. The five o'clock dark, the car that takes too long to forgive you for leaving it outside, the particular silence of a street where everyone has gone in. But there's something in the first real cold— the kind that bites your lungs and makes your eyes water for no emotional reason— that feels like the truth before it's been edited. Snow changes the acoustics. The world gets quieter but the things that remain— the cardinal on the wire, the smoke from a chimney, your breath making visible the fact that you are here— become louder. Winter doesn't take things away. It just stops pretending they were there in the first place. And what's left— the stripped tree, the frozen pond, the empty bench still holding the shape of whoever sat there last— is not less. It's the thing itself without the costume.