The snow has gone. Cold remains.
The year’s deepest freeze has settled into the valley. Warmth withdraws into memory. Tonight will drive the cold deeper still.
From my window, I watch the cold do its work. It strips moisture from the air, leaves frost on fence posts, windshields, the brown grass stretching toward the stream. My eyes water when I roll outside. Breath scrapes the throat. Cheeks, ears, fingertips redden and sting. Each exhalation rises white and thick, ghosting in the air before dissolving into nothing.
The bamboo grove that shelters deer through mild winters has browned and dried. When wind moves through the valley, it rattles—dry leaves, brittle stems clicking against each other like old bones. Kudzu that draped the thicket in green curtains now hangs lifeless through the bramble, dead vines waiting to crumble at a touch.
Deer press together, separating only at midday when sun warms the frozen ground. They scrape at wild turnip roots with hard hooves. Chickadees, juncos, titmice, nuthatches, woodpeckers, and cardinals crowd the feeders, shouldering past each other. The weak die off. Squirrels tear through leaf litter for buried nuts. Mice dart from tunnels once hidden by snow. Foxes watch from the thicket. Owls pivot at each sound. Hawks wheel overhead.
In six months, this valley will bloom thick with summer—a humid tangle of leaf and vine, insect song, catbirds calling from honeysuckle shade.
But now, cold cuts the earth.
The freeze cracks open tough seed casings buried in the frozen ground. Milkweed pods split along their seams, releasing silk to scatter on the wind. Hibernating insects die by the millions—especially the foreigners, the ones not born to endure this depth of cold. Their bodies return to the soil, becoming it. Withered stems, still holding traces of sap, rupture when temperatures plunge. They snap clean. Collapse inward. Fold themselves into the earth that fed them.
All that is depends on the breaking.
The universe waits in the cracked seed, the frozen starling, the split pod.
In the broken stem, bending to the soil.