It’s been a while since I wrote for you. Over a month, to be precise. We figured out a solution for the farm’s water problems, only to lose access again with the freeze. It’s been cold. It’s been hard.

The farm work has been un-pleasant: un-trellising vines full of rotted tomatoes, pulling up landscape fabric to reveal molding topsoil underneath, peeling off slimy outer leaves to salvage the radicchio inside them. Not much to write home about, and not much energy left to write with at the end of the day.

In one of my favorite books, Winter: Five Windows on the Season, journalist Adam Gopnik says we think of “winter as a time of loss, and abandonment, and retreat — the oldest metaphors and myths of winter are metaphors of that kind of loss.”

We talk about seasonal affective disorder in this culture. I wouldn’t call my experience that. It is more a feeling of moving with the seasons, as part of nature, not unlike the trees or the earth, frozen with the tire-marks the tractor left behind in the mud.

It’s too cold for this now, but last month, there were days when we just had to wait until the afternoon to harvest the greens. In the icy mornings, their leaves would be dotted with frost damage. By afternoon, many of the leaves would have restored themselves, working invisibly to repair broken cells. It turns out, plants are self-healers, just like us.

But when you are in the freeze, it is hard to remember anything but. I am reminded every time the season changes that it carries an echo of “the last time it was like this.” To age is to discovere daisy chains of non-linear memories, whether they take the shape of ghosts of Christmases past or simply appear in our hands when we haul in the firewood.

Many of my favorite childhood memories are from winter. One snow day afternoon, I sat watching the snow fall out the window while listening to a particular CD over and over — Winter Solstice II. (The track “Bring Me Back A Song” still does it for me.) Every Christmas Eve for years, I would stay up late with my little sister to watch Little Women on the pull-out couch in our basement. Jo felt like spirit-kin (all the way until the end when she suddenly and inexplicably chose to marry the professor).

The year I turned 12, I got everything I wanted for Christmas: a cassette tape of Amy Grant’s Heart In Motion album, her looking beautiful in a red crushed-velvet dress with curls falling around her face, and a boombox to play it with, plus two sweatshirts. One was gray, oversized, and airbrushed with the mascot of the Washington Huskies. The other was forest green, a men’s cut with a horizontal rib across the chest, and featured Notre Dame’s Fighting Irishman with his fists up.

In the memory, I am standing in front of the piano, arranging and admiring my four gifts, feeling like I am accepted, and okay. For once, instead of giving me what they wanted me to want, or what they told me I should want, my parents asked me what I wanted, and helped me build my little world according to my own dreams. It felt like I was really here.

There is something important about presence that requires not only the body, but the dreams it carries, the ideas it holds, the things it wants to try. There is something important about the need to find out who you can be, through play and experimentation. Something important for which I cannot now find the words.

I can only tell you that when my housemate showed me her own teen-year photos, in many of which she looked like a boy, I was astonished that her parents let her play with something that mine took so seriously. I wondered, sincerely, if I would want what I want now if I had been allowed to develop without all the projections onto my body and my breasts. I wondered if I would feel differently about myself, and I have to accept that I will never know.

The first time I read Winter, what stood out to me was Gopnik’s deconstruction of our winter fantasies, from the myth that no two snowflakes are alike to a passage on eisblumen, the flower-like frost that would vine up 18th-century windows.

As Gopnik described it, the poets and scientists of the German Romantic era hotly debated whether these blooms were the work of God himself or some other strange and beautiful accident. (There is a “scientific explanation,” having to do with impurities in the cast glass used for these windows.) This debate raged for more than a decade, and it was, indeed, the poet Goethe who fought for a less mystical interpretation of winter’s many forms.

Although poetry and science were less divided fields at the time, this was ultimately a contest over imagination, and therefore of interpretation. The poets were all looking at the same thing, and fighting with one another over what it could mean, not so much what it was. It seems they were less interested in reality than in how we see it, understanding that how we interpret what we experience is often more important than the experience itself.

Gopnik asks:

… who made winter, and why was it made? Do we project form and meaning onto something that is just an absence, a non-happening of the natural order of warmth and sunshine, or does winter offer some mysterious residual sign of divinity—perhaps in a piercing and haunting musical form or, for that matter, etched on a window? If winter is ours, who are we?