Learning to Love the Last Dregs of Winter

How I'm embracing the quiet and the cozy before the excitement of gardening season begins

The snowdrops are out in Prospect Park, and when I saw them a few weeks ago they really got my hopes up. Green shoots! Flowers! Spring! Not so fast. This time of year is full of those little springtime teases, and I’ve learned a long time ago not to pay attention to the groundhog, either.

I do like winter, but I like the first half more than the last. I like the holiday season part of winter but not the dirty snow part. In the first, cozy half of winter I can be content in the moment, happy to spend time in the warm indoors under twinkling lights. In the dirty snow half I’m just white knuckling it ‘till March.

There’s the garden, of course, and every winter I start sowing seeds earlier and earlier, and it absolutely helps. I’ve been sowing a lot already this year and keeping track of it all in my garden journal, already busy (prematurely) planning which plants will go in which pots.

But there will be plenty of time for gardening later on, and for most of the year I’ll have flowers growing out on the terrace. The growing season is long, and February is so short, and if I really want to live in the moment I might as well try my best to enjoy this particular one, dirty snow and all. (Seriously, though, I wish it would stop.)

Candles and incense and some scented geranium prunings put to good use

I’m Lighting Matches (or at least a USB lighter)

I’m not an incense person, or at least I didn’t think I was until my husband got me got me some Japanese incense and a ceramic holder for Christmas, and now I’m hooked. The smell of it! He got me a packet of incense from the Brooklyn Toast store, and I don’t know if they still carry it and it did seem a little fancy, so I ordered a few less expensive packs from Shoyeido that I don’t feel bad about burning every night (I’m really loving Moss Garden!). Drew says that it has a fireplace kind of feel to it, with the tiny flame and trailing smoke, and I agree.

We’ve also been burning candles, and we usually have at least one going at dinner, but this post from Jo Thompson inspired me to keep the Christmas candles up even longer this winter:

Don’t let January get you down - I have a solution

Barbara Pym in Finstock, Oxfordshire, the little village where she spent her last years (Photo via The Times)

I’m Reading Cozy Novels

I’ve already been sick twice this winter—all a part of living in a big city and taking the subway, I guess—but when I came down with the flu last Friday I kind of was glad to have an excuse to lie in bed and read all weekend.

When I’m sick (or troubled or depressed or stressed) I stick to comfort reads. Right now I’m powering through The Power Broker, and it’s amazing, but not for the sick bed or for those times when I wake up at 3 A.M. and can’t go to bed until I’ve read a few pages of something pleasantly distracting.

Tough times call for cozy novels. And my favorite writer of cozy novels (and one of my favorite writers period) is Barbara Pym. For the last few months I’ve been re-reading some of my favorites of her works: Some Tame Gazelle in December and Jane and Prudence in January. I haven’t decided what to read for February yet.

Maybe ‘comfort read’ sounds belittling. By cozy novel I don’t mean beach read. Pym was smart and witty, and her novels are smart and witty, too, filled with literary references and inside jokes which you appreciate so much more after reading the extremely hard-to-put-down (and also cozy) Barbara Pym biography by Paula Byrne.

But Pym’s writing is also just really lovely. If I’m sick with flu or up at 3 A.M. with terrible thoughts I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be than living inside a Barbara Pym novel, with its quaint English villages that revolve around old churches with their eccentric curates and meddling parishioners and jumble sales and tea times and funny little dramas. (There are lots of gardens in these books, too, but that’s beside the point)

Out walking the dog with Drew (thanks for the photo!)

I’m Dressing like Mimi in La Bohème

I don’t really like Mimi that much (or La Bohème or even Puccini for that matter) but this winter I’ve been feeling a little like her —cold and sickly and sometimes sad—so maybe that’s why I’ve been inadvertently dressing like her. My current winter costume is a dress (always), black boots, the black wool cape I’ve been wearing for ten years, a pair of brown leather gloves (new: vintage deadstock?) that I found for free on a front stoop, and . . . a bonnet.

“There’s the girl with the bonnet,” a man in Cobble Hill muttered to himself one day as my husband and I walked by.

“Oh, no, are you mad?” asked Drew. The man’s observation sounded like a neutral one to me: very much as if he said “there’s a brown dog” or “there’s a red door.” No judgement.

Drew must have thought otherwise.

Are bonnets strange? Are they ugly? Because I just think they’re practical. I’d been looking for some kind of winter hat that wasn’t a beanie (I have a small head so beanies never looked great on me, plus they mess up your hair when you take them off, plus I just wanted something different). I knit mine from a Ravelry pattern that I can’t find any more, but this pattern is pretty close.

After that I set out trying to convince Drew that, far from being dorky and uncool, bonnets are an underground trend that I was somehow an early adopter of. Every time I’d see a cool young Brooklynite wearing anything resembling a bonnet I’d tell him. Though I don’t know if all of these were bonnets, if I’m being honest. A headscarf wrapped around the head is a bonnet if you squint.

So when Drew sent me a New York Times article declaring adult bonnets “the winter hat of the moment” I almost felt as though I’d gotten away with something.

Sometimes I wonder what I’ll do when knit bonnet season is over, but I guess there are always headscarves.

My favorite artwork in all of the Met: the portrait of actress Elizabeth Farren, by Thomas Lawrence

I’m Looking for Beauty Indoors

From the first warm spring weekend onwards I want to spend as much time as possible outside. Picnics in parks, trips to farmers’ markets, dog walks around the neighborhood, lots of gardening, and even better: sitting out on the terrace surrounded by the flowers, trying to resist temptation to deadhead and putter (and always failing). When it’s so nice outside I feel guilty for being inside.

So this winter I’ve been trying to cram in some of the NYC indoor activities I miss out on in the summer. I’ve been going to operas, I’ve been seeing movies in movie theaters (a big deal for me since I’m not great at sitting still for a long time), I’ve been visiting museums. My favorite museum to get lost in for half a day is definitely The Met. I love the European paintings section best since I can’t get enough of the late 18th century portraits of people who look like they belong in Fanny Burney novels or Barry Lyndon. I just think they look so exciting.

I will say that when I went to the Met a few weeks ago I kept getting drawn to flowers, whether in Pre-Raphaelite paintings or tapestries or carved into art nouveau columns. Focus on art and history I kept telling myself, but I guess I really just had flowers on the brain.

Little icy pond in Prospect Park

And Outdoors, Too (of course)

In Prospect Park there’s no ugly time of year; it’s honestly beautiful in every month and season, and unless it’s finger-numbingly cold or pouring rain I never regret a stroll through the Vale of Cashmere.

As much as I admire the artfully designed window boxes in Brooklyn Heights there’s something to be said for seeing winter in its more natural state. The seedheads, the dried brownness of it all; a bit of color here and there in an evergreen branch or berry, the standout red of a fat cardinal.

And of course there are the snowdrops. Earlier I referred to them as ‘teases,’ which isn’t fair at all since they’re wintertime flowers. They don’t have to symbolize spring or the promise of something exciting ahead in order for me to enjoy them. I can like them right now, in the moment. February can’t be ugly as long as there are snowdrops blooming. I’ve got a tiny pot of them at home just waiting to come up, and as soon as they do I’ll bring them inside to gawk at and admire.