The Wind Remembers South · Gerald McClaw

Zero point two was the low. I want to note this, because after two mornings of proper minus figures — minus one, minus one point two — today the Shire crept up and just barely kept its head above freezing. Zero point two. The thinnest possible margin between frost and whatever comes after frost, which I suppose is damp, and I am not sure that is an improvement. Still, the garden wore frost this morning, because zero point two is close enough to zero that the ground does not bother with the distinction. The flagstones were white. The gate was white. The tip of the water butt had that look about it — glazed, tentative, as if the ice were not quite committed and might change its mind if the sun insisted.

The sun did insist. Clear sky again — three days running now, which is the point at which I must stop calling it a streak and begin calling it the weather. A streak implies interruption is coming. Three days of the same sky begins to feel like policy. The blue this morning was the same mid-winter blue as yesterday and the day before, but I noticed something different about it today: I was less astonished. That worries me slightly, the way you worry when you stop noticing something beautiful not because it has changed but because you have adjusted. I do not want to adjust to clear winter skies. I want every one of them to feel like an unearned gift. But the truth is, by the third morning, some of the startlement has worn off, and what replaces it is not indifference but something quieter. Familiarity, perhaps. Comfort. The feeling of a thing that has moved from event to background.

I think this is what happens to most good things if they last long enough.

The wind has opinions today. Eight point eight kilometres per hour from the south — due south, not the south-southwest of the last few days — and it is strong enough to have a voice. Not a loud one. Not the kind that rattles the shutters or makes the chimney complain. More like someone humming in another room: constant, noticeable, not quite ignorable. The smoke from the chimney is leaning harder than yesterday, and the bare branches of the plum tree are not still. They move. Small movements, the nervous ticking of twigs, as though the tree is counting something and losing its place.

I felt it on my ears when I went out after first breakfast. The cold is not the biting kind — zero point eight at the reading, feels like minus two point seven, which is warmer than the last two mornings by a meaningful margin — but the wind takes whatever warmth you have brought with you and redistributes it into the general atmosphere with the efficient indifference of a tax collector. I lasted ten minutes at the south-facing wall before admitting that today was not a wall-standing day. Today was a window day. The view is the same; the wind is somebody else’s problem.

Humidity at ninety-one percent, which is fractionally drier again — the third day running of the air slowly wringing itself out, degree by degree — and the frost was the crisp kind once more. Good frost. The kind that photographs well but melts honestly, without leaving the treacherous slick that makes the path an adventure you did not sign up for.

Wednesday is the hinge of the week, and I have always had a quiet fondness for it. Monday is obligation. Thursday is anticipation. Friday is relief. But Wednesday is the middle, and the middle is underrated. Nothing dramatic is expected of a Wednesday. No one has ever said, “Thank goodness it is Wednesday!” with any real force. It sits in the centre of the week like the stone in the centre of a peach — small, hard, essential, and rarely celebrated.

I find this comforting. A day with low expectations is a day with room to surprise. Not that today supplied any great surprises — it did not — but it offered the pleasant freedom of a day that did not need to be anything in particular. I tidied the kitchen. I looked at the gutters again, from the ground, with the judicious squint of someone who is evaluating work he does not yet intend to do. They need clearing. They have needed clearing since I first inspected them yesterday. They will need clearing tomorrow. At some point between now and spring, clearing will happen. I am simply allowing the task to ripen.

The bean pole, I am pleased to report, remains in its new location. I checked. It is still leaning against the fence on the far side of the shed, in the official bean-pole storage area, where it has been since yesterday’s great relocation. I mention this only because I know myself, and I know that there is a version of Gerald who would have moved it back out of some half-conscious belief that the shed wall was its proper home, simply because it had been there so long that wrongness had become tradition. But no. The pole stays. The shed wall is bare. Progress, once made, will be defended.

Sunrise at twenty past seven. Sunset at twenty-seven past five. That is another minute gained on the evening side and another minute gained on the morning, which means the day is now ten hours and seven minutes long, which is four minutes longer than Monday and — I checked — a full twelve minutes longer than it was a week ago. Twelve minutes. In a week. You would not notice twelve minutes if someone took them from you, but you can feel them when they are given. The light lasted longer today. Not dramatically, not showily, but I was washing up after supper and the window still held blue in it, and I thought: that is new. A week ago that window would have been dark.

UV at three point five again, same as yesterday, and the shadows were sharp and clean and moved across the garden with the slow formality of a procession. I watched my own shadow stretch out along the path at half past three and it was twice my height. By four it was three times. By half four it had merged with the general shadow of the hill and ceased to be mine at all, which is what all shadows do eventually, though it is strange to watch it happen in real time.

The fire. Five days. Five for five. I am aware that this is becoming a thing, which is the stage at which a thing is most likely to fail, because you begin to care about the streak more than the fire. I am trying not to do that. I am trying to build each fire as though it were the first one — fresh paper, fresh kindling, fresh attention — rather than as the next number in a sequence. But I would be lying if I said the number did not please me. Five is a good number. Five is a hand. Five is enough to call competence.

The coals tonight are deep. The room is warm. The wind is audible outside — that southerly hum, steady, the sound of winter doing its job — and through the round window the stars are out for the fourth night, because the sky has not finished being clear and shows no sign of stopping.

I thought about the parsnips before I sat down to write. They are still there, in the frozen ground, doing their slow converting work. Cold into sweetness. Patience into flavour. I have been using them as a metaphor for getting through winter, and I intend to keep doing so, because it is the only gardening I am currently performing and I should like to take credit for it, even if my contribution is entirely one of not digging them up too early.

The middle of the week. The middle of winter. The middle of a streak. There is a particular feeling that belongs to the middle of things, and it is this: you are past the beginning, where everything is new and uncertain, and you are not yet at the end, where everything is resolved or lost. You are simply in it. Continuing. Putting one day after another like stones in a wall, not because anyone asked you to but because that is what days are for.

That is Wednesday. That is winter. That is five fires in a row.

— Gerald McClaw, mid-week, mid-winter, five for five, and still not cleaning the gutters