You may be familiar with Ezra Pound’s 1915 poem that begins “Winter is icumen in/ Lhude sing goddamm….” The poem has an extra line or two, so it doesn’t quite fit the familiar tune to “Sumer Is Icumen In.” But if you take those extra lines of poetry and stuff them into the two ground melodies, you can actually sing the song. It makes a nice antidote to the sappy Christmas carols that we hear playing over and over and over everywhere we go in this week leading up to Christmas. You’ll find the sheet music to “Winter Is Icumen In” here.
Category Archives: Winter
A Thesaurus of Humor
When we went to visit my grandmother, who lived in Staten Island, we would stay in her house. My older sister, Jean, and I would spend hours in the downstairs room where the TV was; the television stations in New York had different programming than we had back home, and we were fascinated to see TV shows that we had never seen before.
The room was full of books, too. I think it had been my grandfather’s study, or office. He had died two weeks after I was born, so I never met him. Jean and I found the books fascinating. We leafed through them, and as we got older, we read a good many of them.
I still have a tattered copy of the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, dated 1894, which Grandma gave me when I was eleven of twelve. But I no longer have A Thesaurus of Humor, which I discovered when I was eight, and which Grandma also gave to me. I took it home and read it cover to cover, and I would read the jokes out loud to my parents, and memorize them. I must have been insufferable.
Dad told me that my grandfather, his father, had been the managing editor of the Staten Island Advance and a member of one or two fraternal organizations and had taken jokes from the book to put into speeches that he had had to give. I only vaguely understood what Dad meant, just as I only vaguely understood some of the jokes.
Today, as I was walking through Porter Square in Cambridge, one of those old jokes suddenly came up out of memory. I have a touch of a cold, walking briskly loosened up some congestion, so I hawked and spat, making sure to spit on the road, not on the sidewalk. That’s when the joke re-emerged from memory.
MAN: Your honor, I feel I should be fined.
JUDGE: Why is that?
MAN: I expectorated on the sidewalk.
JUDGE: Well, if it makes you feel better — the Court fines you two dollars. Next!
I distinctly remember reading that joke in Grandma’s house, and not understanding it. I asked my father what “expectorate” meant. “Why, it means ‘spit’,” said Dad. Then my eight-year-old self thought I got the joke: how silly of the man to ask to be fined just because he spat on the sidewalk! I hadn’t thought of that joke in thirty-five years, but remembering it today I finally realized that the joke was funny in large part because the man was obviously educated and overconscientious.
A Thesaurus of Humor disappeared some years ago. I can still see it in my mind’s eye: a thick book bound in medium blue. I can remember how the jokes were laid out on the page, grouped together by category. I wish I still had it. It’s a good thing I don’t still have it, because I would probably succumb to the temptation of reading it again cover to cover, and memorizing the jokes, and reading them out loud to people who would only listen out of politeness.
Sunrise
Winter is when the memories seem to rise up unbidden, and winter is coming to an end. Even though I tend to stay up late, I keep getting awakened by the light of sunrise, now about 5:30 a.m. Springtime is overtaking memory.
But somehow, a memory of a sunrise slipped into consciousness just now….
One June, when we were living over by White Pond in Concord. Carol was away on one of her trips to Mexico; I was sleeping alone; I came wide awake before dawn. Say four o’clock. Couldn’t get to sleep, didn’t want to. Put the canoe on the car and drove down to the river.
Untied the canoe as the sky was just starting to turn light, paddled down river to Fairhaven Bay. I drifted into the bay as the sky started to turn from black to blue. Mist rising over the bay. I tried a few casts in the shallow, upstream end of the bay; nothing. In the downstream end of the bay, there’s a deeper hole, and there I hooked a big bass on light tackle and with barbless hooks; after maybe quarter of an hour I brought him to the boat, wet my hand, and held him while I released the hook then let him swim away to keep breeding. I turned around to see that the sun had just hit the top of the rising mist, about twenty feet above the river; an Osprey circled overhead in the sun, a far more efficient catcher of fish than a single human could ever be; a Great Blue Heron stalked smaller fish along the shore. I drifted in silence for a while. The sun crept up over the horizon: gold light in the mist; but as I paddled into the mist, it only appeared white.
The mist was gone by the time I reached the boat landing.
…a memory that doesn’t translate into words very well. A memory that dissipated as I tried to write it down. Something about a gut-level, direct knowledge of my place in the ecosystem, in the universe — but that’s putting it badly. It’s gone now.
Snow
The snow moved in late this morning. At a quarter past eleven, Carol looked out the window of our apartment and exclaimed, “Snow flurries!” I went out for a walk fifteen minutes later, and the snow flurries had settled into a heavy snow fall; I got to the waterfront and I could not see the town of Fairhaven across the harbor; I got halfway across the bridge and the ground was white, by the time I returned home, and hour later, there was an inch of snow on the ground.
The visibility was poor, but I could see the usual waterfowl on the water, and the usual gulls flying overhead. The ducks never seem bothered by rain or snow, only by high winds that force them to seek refuge on the lee side of the harbor and islands. The gulls don’t seem bothered by snow, rain, or high winds.
Not only did the birds remain unfazed by the snow, but we have gone far enough through winter that humans didn’t seem bothered by it either. The traffic rushed over the bridge and across Pope’s Island the same as usual; the only difference being that the tires made a different sound because of the snow that had been melted by road salt. And I passed half a dozen pedestrians, whereas we often see no pedestrians at all on our walks over to Fairhaven. It was almost as if the weather brought out more pedestrians, more people who wanted a chance to walk through the falling snow.
Winter walk
Carol and I went on our regular walk at lunch hour, over to Fairhaven and back. The wind was blowing out of the west-northwest, and two red pennants flew from the Wharfinger building: gale warning.
Walking over to Fairhaven wasn’t so bad, with the wind at our backs. Coming back, the wind was full in our faces. On the most exposed parts of the bridges, the gusts were strong enough to noticeably slow my forward progress.
The wind was strong, but bracing. You feel more alive somehow under a clear blue sky when the westerly winds of February are sweeping across land and water. By this point in the season, the cold isn’t nearly so bothersome; instead, it gets your blood moving.
Hours later, as I write this, I can still feel a little hotspot on my right cheek where the flesh is tightest across the bone; a day’s worth of that wind on my face, mixed with inattention on my part, could have brought frostbite. I wish I could have spent the whole day outdoors. It’s not a bad thing to have to pay attention.
Meditation, ukulele-style
After a month or more of unseasonably warm weather, temperatures have dropped back below freezing. Ordinarily at this time of year, 29 degrees would feel mild, warm even; but on Friday it felt bitter cold. The strong westerly breeze, damp and raw, didn’t help matters.
I walked across the harbor bridges to Fairhaven, all bundled up; and, if truth be told, feeling a little sorry for myself. It had been a week filled with too many little things to do, I had lost sight of the big picture, lost in the trivia of church work. And now it was cold, and it was supposed to snow. I walked along with my head down, brooding.
As I got to the gas station on Fish Island, for no reason at all I started to sing ‘ukulele songs. I’ve never been to Hawai’i — the closest I’ve come is reading the old James Michener novel, which isn’t very close — so I really don’t know what Hawai’i is like, except that it must be warm and friendly:
I wanna go back to my little grass shack in Kealakekua, Hawai’i,
I wanna be with all the kanes and wahines
That I used to know, long ago….
A truck pulled up beside me into the gas station and a man got out. The noise from four lanes of traffic running right next to me meant I could sing at the top of my lungs and he could barely hear me:
I can hear the old guitars playing
On the beach at Honaunau
I can hear the old Hawai’ians saying:
Komo mai no kaua i ka hale welakahao….
(Years ago, my ‘ukulele teacher told me that last line doesn’t mean anything at all, it’s just there to confuse the haoles.) Further along, a man stood on top of an old semi-trailer amidst all the junk and old machinery on Fish Island; a bulldozer rolled up to him, raised its bucket up, he stepped in and was lowered down. I kept singing:
When you love, ‘ukulele style,
With every note your heart will float
Far away to a tropic isle,
Where a ‘ukulele tune is softly played….
I kept walking along past the parking lot for Pope’s Island marina. The bright February sun crisply lit up every little piece of trash and broken shell along the highway. Ordinarily the trash would bother me, but I just kept singing.
Green winter
In some of the old New England records, you read about “green winters”: winters when it was relatively warm, and there was little snow. We’re in the middle of a green winter. Many lakes and ponds remain free of ice, and the ground isn’t even frozen. It’s nice that we haven’t had much snow, and it’s nice that our heating bill has been low. But a green winter often means more insect pests the following summer, to the dismay of gardeners and farmers. Worse yet, in the old days cold was thought to kill of diseases, so green winters were thought to bring disease; and here we are faced with the possibility of an avian flu epidemic following a green winter. I’m enough of a New Englander that I can’t just accept the gift of an easy winter; I have to search out something the disadvantages and disasters that must accompany something good; to a New Englander, there is no such thing as an unalloyed good.
Memory
This isn’t really my memory, it’s my father’s memory. But the story has become so much a part of our family’s folklore that I almost feel as if I had been there, and had witnessed the whole thing myself. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly when all this took place. My grandmother, my father’s mother, died in the fall of 1981, so it must have been that summer, the summer of 1981.
The whippoorwills had all left ten years earlier. They used to nest in the hay fields behind our house and call in the evenings — whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will — but then one summer we didn’t hear them any more. Sometimes we’d say, Remember when the whippoorwills used to call at in the summer evenings? And one of us would reply, Boy, we haven’t heard one of them in years. That summer, a whippoorwill returned.
Then what happened to my father must have taken place after I had returned to college. I have this vague memory of him telling me about this over the phone as I sat in the darkness on a hot, steamy Philadelphia evening. His story went like this:
For several nights, he had been awakened by the whippoorwill. It was loud, as if it were right next to the house. That it would be that close was surprising; even more surprisingly, its loud calls didn’t awaken either my mother or my younger sister. My mother tended to be a light sleeper; my sister a little less so; but dad usually sleeps like a log, and only the alarm clock can awaken him. Yet he was the only one whom the whippoorwill awakened.
One night, it sounded unbelievably loud, it sounded as if it were closer than it ever had been before. Dad was awakened by its ceaseless calling — whip-poor-will whip-poor-will whip-poor-will whip-poor-will whip-poor-will — so loud he couldn’t get back to sleep, and no one else was awake. He got up and walked down the hall to the bathroom, and stopped to look out the hall window, over the roof of the porch. The moon shone brightly down, and there it was: the whippoorwill, sitting on the porch roof, right outside the hall window, calling and calling and calling.
He stood there watching it for awhile. They’re shy, nocturnal, well-camouflaged birds and maybe one in a thousand people ever sees one. Dad, who is Pennsylvania Dutch, remembered an old superstition: if you see a whippoorwill, someone close to you will die. He stood there in the moonlight watching and listening to the whippoorwill, with maybe a little chill running down his spine.
You know the rest of the story. Dad’s mother, who was in a nursing home that summer, died in October. As much as I like birds, as much as I’d like to see a whippoorwill, that seems too high a price to pay to see one.
Memory
When my older sister and I were quite small — this was before our younger sister was born — our mother used to tell us stories sometimes before bed. I remember one summer, on some hot summer nights, lying in bed in my tiny bedroom, I suppose we were in there because I was younger. My mother sat on the edge of the bed and told us a long, involved story of the Blue City. I wish now I could remember the story, although maybe it’s best I don’t; it may not have been nearly as mysterious and evocative as I remember it to be. My bedroom faced east, and the last light of the sun reflected off the old white Hodgman house across the street and filled the room with gold-tinged light. In those days, whippoorwills still called in the summer evenings; but whippoorwills have long been extirpated as breeding birds in that part of Massachusetts, and the hay fields and apple orchards behind where we lived have been covered by sprawl in the form of low-density starter mansions, and indeed that modest house we lived in was recently torn down and replaced by a three-thousand square foot house. It’s still there in memory: the fading light, the hope that I’d hear a whippoorwill, the Blue City.