My first bird of the year was a dark-eyed junco — I think. I got as close as I could to it, perched there in the brown branches of the bare lilac bush. It had a white underbelly, and dark body and head. Google searches and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology identified it as a member of the sparrow family, and confirmed it’s one of the most common birds in North America. My backyard visitor is but one of 630 million.
So, does the commonness of my first bird indicate I’m in for a boring year? No! Inspired, as I wrote in an earlier column, by Margaret Renkl’s “Comfort of Crows” and her belief in the meaning of first sightings, I learned that, spiritually speaking, the junco means 2024 for me is going to be filled with what sounds like adventure. Different cultures imbue the junco with several wonderful meanings — freedom of the spirit, and truth, and heartfelt meetings of the mind among them.
I’m up for all of that. Besides my first bird sighting, by the time you read this column, we may have had our first significant snowfall. It could be a bust on the coast, with a wintry mix bringing us more rain than snow, but I still get as excited at the prospect as if I’m 10 years old. By February I’ll be grumpy as I grab the shovel, but the first snow is special.
Sunlight on fresh snow produces a quality of light I wish I could bottle and give away all year long. Blindingly bright, it seems to be laughing at our winter brooding. “Silly you,” it’s saying, “There’s always light this season if you look.”
A recent pre-dinner run to Crosby’s confirmed this. Christmas is mere weeks behind us and most homes and businesses I drove by were still beautifully lit. Candles in the windows, lights strung on bushes, snowflake-shaped lights hanging off front porch rafters. Why don’t we keep them up as long as possible? What’s the rush to take them down?
Katherine May, author of “Wintering” and empress of all things winter light, notes in a substack post that she puts her Christmas lights out in November and keeps them up through mid-February. She has other tips in a wonder of wisdom she dubs “A manifesto for winter light.”
My favorites are her inspiration to “make candlelight ordinary.” She says that in Scandinavia candles aren’t treated as “special or romantic, but as an everyday accessory, part of the ordinary workings of the home. In particular, candles are lit early, burning through gray mornings and dull afternoons. They do not seem to be there to illuminate anything, but instead to offer warmth and contrast to the blue winter light.”
I’ve gotten lazier, or is it smarter, and started supplementing my indoor candles with battery-operated ones. A shunda (Yiddish for shame) my candle-loving friends have exclaimed! I’m not claiming they are the same. To my own — not my college-aged daughter’s — delight, I recently did an at-home experiment and placed a real tea light next to a battery-operated one, to compare. The flame of a lit wick is obviously superior. It’s alive, like an artist’s rendering next to an AI-generated work. Yet, I’ve chosen carefully, and to my light-seeking eye, the “flames” of these faux candles shimmer, and I can go to bed without fear I’ve forgotten to snuff them all out.
My other favorite tip of May’s is to “revel in Apricity.” First of all, what a wonderful word! Apricity. It means the warmth of the winter sun. And truly, when else do you stop in the middle of the sidewalk and tilt your face upward to feel the sun’s direct rays? In summer, we slather on sunscreen and sit under umbrellas, peer out from beneath the brim of a hat. In winter, we relish the light, because it is fleeting, because it is wonderful, and if we look, it is all around.
