The pleasures of winter

I must admit, winter is not my favorite season.  I suppose this is for all the usual reasons--dark weather, short days, cold--but also because I feel at loose ends. As long as the ground is frozen, there's not much I can do in the way of gardening.  And so I pace the house, polish the copper pans, wax the turniture, and peer through the windows in hopes of a thaw.  That's why I was happy to discover that the winters in my parts of France--Paris, Normandy, and Haute Provence--were relatively mild.  That is, until a couple of years ago.  Since then, for two years in a row we've had relatively severe winters, complete with subfreezing temperatures over extended periods and even snow!  To chase away the cafard (the "cockroach"--the French term for the blues), I've made a sort of mental list of  "a few of my favorite things" about the dark season.

Over the weekend, a series of snow squalls blew through Normandy, making it (briefly) the snowiest place in France.  And so I got a chance to meditate on how snow enhances the landscape--and the plants in it.  Of course, many would argue--rightly--that snow cloaks an otherwise drab scene in glittering purity.  This is true of course--for a limited time, until the snow becomes trampled, starts to melt, and becomes that dreaded February commodity:  slush.  But, no no!  I promised to be positive, so instead,  I'll celebrate snow's way of enhancing the architecture of plants.  For instance, our pagoda dogwood never looked so pagoda-like as when all dressed up in snow.


Of course, snow accents the architectural qualities of almost everything, including...architecture itself.  The "perched" hilltop villages of Haute Provence are never so striking as when they're with snow accentuating the graceful cascade of roofs down a hillside.


There's also a certain poignancy to a special category of plants when the snow falls.  Winter-bloomers such as hybrid witchhazel (in Normandy) and in Provence, the waxy white blossoms of the Christmas rose (Helleborus niger) appear super-wondrous when cloaked in snow.  The Japanese are especially sensitive to the paradoxical beauty of winter flowers.  For them, a late snowfall on precocious plum blossoms is a haiku in itself.

Winter flowers are high on my list of my favorite things about winter.  They affirm that spring isn't that far off, after all, and they epitomize the tension between the two seasons--between the dark cold of winter and the light and warmth that leads us inexorably into spring.

And speaking of light, the low-angled light of winter has its own particular beauty, throwing everything under its beam into sharp relief.  It was in the light of a winter afternoon that we discovered this pair of ancient pigeonniers (pigeon roosts) built into the top story of an ancient bastide in a tiny, lost village called St-Croix-de-Lauzes.  The pathos of the cracked remnants of colorful ceramic tiles that once attracted wayward pigeons back to their home seemed more intense under winter's beam than it would have on a fullsome summer day.

Our old house in Haute Provence was built with the wisdom of the ancients to make the most of this low winter light, beaming up to us from the southern reaches of a cold blue sky.  On a winter's afternoon, the light stretched a golden finger into our dining room to set ablaze a bouquet of mimosa flowers, a bowl of walnuts and clementines, and an old candelabra, transforming these mundane objects into a luminous still-life.  Winter may be more parsimonious with its light than summer, but as a result we become more mindful of its presence.




Of course, most of our trees have bare branches in winter, which on my darker winter days can make me feel gloomy.   But look on the bright side, I tell myself (in my more positive moments), and think of all the secrets their bare branches reveal.  For instance, as many times as we have driven the road to the neighboring village of Vachères, we had never noticed this beautiful old chapel, restored into a private dwelling, lying down a slope to the east of the road.  Plus, for the botanists among us, winter presents a challenging time to identify trees.  By now I'm able to recognize the distinctive silhouette of the twin almond trees in the main photo above (head of article), and in my mind's eye juxtapose the clouds of fragrant pink blossoms that are only a bit more than a month away.

In another positive note, the arrival of substantial snowfalls in Haute Provence has allowed us to try out new activities.  We have explored the remote landscape of Contadour on snowshoes, and reveled in utter solitude and unparalleled views across unspoiled landscapes of forest and lavender fields outlined in crystalline white and blue shadows. 









For the strangest illusion occurs when you see a lavender field on a sunny winter afternoon:  The low angle of the light casts lavender-blue shadows along each row of lavender, giving the impression of a reflection of invisible summer flowers.  It's such an incredible trompe l'oeil that I often stare at it until my eyes water.


I can vouch there's no better antidote to the winter doldrums than getting out and engaging in some sort of physical activity in the snow.  In fact, speaking for myself, I think part of my winter blues come from simple and unaccustomed inactivity.  Plus, a bit of vigorous exercise allows one to enjoy some of the splendors of winter cooking with--if not impunity--at least less of a sense of engaging in a guilty pleasure.  Winter is a season when the body appreciates an extra calorie or two, so dishes such as this warm salad of pig's feet showered with black truffles is especially welcome.  And of course, let's not forget in our enumeration of winter pleasures, that winter is truffle season! 

When Denis and I came back from snowshoeing, we enjoyed a very simple but satisfying winter lunch.  I'd bought a hunk of raclette cheese, which I put in an old earthenware potato cooker from Normandy (a strange dish that looks kind of like a half-moon-shaped ceramic dustpan) to melt at the edge of the kitchen fire. I then rushed it to the table, where we scraped off the melted layers onto chunks of steaming hot boiled potatoes.  This was raclette in its primordial state, before the age of electric raclette irons made to melt wafer-thin slices of the renowned cheese to be dumped neatly onto the potatoes.  In the old days, you simply put a generous hunk of cheese to melt by the fire and you scraped (raclette comes from the French racler, which means "to scrape"), the delicious melted goo directly off the hunk.  All I can say is, how can anything so simple taste so divine?

I suppose there's no better way to close my list of favorite winter things than with dessert.  As long as they last (usually until the end of January), our favorite dessert is a veritable icon of all that is wonderful about winter:  roasted chestnuts.  The old chestnut skillet, pierced with numerous round holes that allow the smoke to lick up around the nuts, is taken off its iron hook and pressed into service.  After the fire from meal-cooking has died down to glowing coals (usually right when we're ready to begin dinner, the fully loaded chestnut skillet is placed over them.  I can be counted on to jump up several times during the meal to shake and prod the chestnuts into new positions, assuring that they cook evenly without burning.  They're always ready right in time for dessert, when we like to pair them with a sip of raspberry eau-de-vie, and I can be counted on to announce, like a Paris street vendor, "Chauds, chauds, chauds, les marrons!"

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