Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

H. is May’s husband. He features prominently at the beginning of the narrative, as his sudden appendix issues rush him to hospital and cause May to experience a wintering in the middle of an “Indian Summer.” Here, H.’s example illustrates how downturns can take hold suddenly, at the moments when a person is least prepared for them. After the first chapter, H. plays a meager supportive role in the rest of the narrative. He responds to May but does not appear to offer any of his own ideas on wintering. The Guardian’s Kate Kellaway finds this disappointing. Kellaway writes how H.’s “life hangs in the balance, but after making a wonderful and, to us, unexpected recovery, he practically disappears from May’s narrative. It is a rum start because he is so abruptly dropped, his story giving way to hers” (Kellaway).

May’s six-year-old son Bert is more closely tied to her experiences of wintering than H. is. Bert goes to the frozen North in utero, when May is five months pregnant. She decides to make this daring expedition part of Bert’s personal mythology, as she tells him of his pre-birth adventure and encourages him to draw strength from it. While May attempts to include Bert in her fascination with snow, buying him snow gear that he outgrows every year, he does not have the opportunity to share in this natural wonder until his sixth birthday. His idea of snow as something unreal is expressed in the simile likening it to a mythical dragon. When the snow arrives, Bert’s excitement is not exactly symmetrical with May’s. He is more cautious about his enjoyment of it, and on the second snow day he prefers indoor games to going out in the cold. This is symptomatic of a disconnect between modern childhood and the realities of winter, engendering a sense of loss in the reader.

May portrays her relationship with her son as one that alternates between phases of intimacy and phases of misunderstanding. His misery at school, caused by the acute anxiety the place causes him, brings him closer to May, as she acknowledges his pain and models how to be sad. She describes how “we traveled through the dark moments together. I won’t pretend it was fun but it was necessary all the same. […] We worried and slept it off, and didn’t sleep, and let out timetables turn upside down. We didn’t so much retreat from the world as let it recede from us” (139). Here, May creates the impression of a mother and son unit, withdrawing from the world but finding compassion in each other. The idea of timetables turning upside down conveys the extent to which May allows her son to escape from the scholastic routine that has stifled him. Her approach flies in the face of conventional parental wisdom to conform and establish a sense of control.

Hanne, May’s friend from Finland, is one of the Nordic gurus that the author summons to give advice on how countries with profound winters endure them. May writes that Hanne “is intimate with winter; it’s in her blood,” and that she “rarely misses an opportunity to contrast her Nordic hardiness with our pitiable English frailty” (28). Most of all, Hanne shows that coming from Liminka, a place where half the year is spent in below freezing temperatures, one must make serious physical and mental preparations for winter. These include the talvitelat ritual of storing away summer clothes and bringing out winter ones and the sauna, which she describes as a quasi-spiritual experience. While such rituals may improve one’s mood, there are others, such as making sure that all home repairs are done in the summer and that the house is well-lit and resourced, that are essential for survival. These align with the patterns of the animals and plants in winter, forcing Finnish people to be more in tune with nature than Southeast Englanders, who have winters that are mild enough to ignore. Crucially, Hanne, who lost her father to a winter suicide, knows that preparation for the dark and cold and withdrawing indoors is essential to mental health as well as physical health. While Hanne’s father’s fate in a place that is distant to most of May’s readers may seem exceptional, it still serves as a warning to take winter and wintering seriously.

An Englishman who spent time as a shepherd in Greece, this anonymous man developed a fascination with the much-maligned wolf. While the wolf is a symbol of chaos in human society, the wolf tracker learned to enjoy the fierce contrasts of these misunderstood animals’ personalities. May is fascinated with him because he embodies wolfish qualities including quietness, reflectiveness, and a frankness of gaze. Her feeling that she is a “domestic pet” next to this “wild animal” enlightens her to the fact that “a certain raw edge had been bred out of me” (175). While this man is wintry and authentic, May considers that mainstream society, with its promotion of summery extrovert manners, causes people to lose their wildness and authentic appeal.

The American poet Sylvia Plath had a poem titled “Wintering” published posthumously in her 1965 collection Ariel. The ideas in the poem about bees surviving the winter in whatever meager way they can, and with the season being a time for women’s work, find expression in May’s work of the same title. While as May writes, “Plath […] did not survive her winter” and died by suicide after dealing with unbearable depression, she knew what it was to prepare for darkness and even find the creative potential in it (238). For May, Plath’s view of winter as a time for women’s work is a comment “on lean times that women can survive,” especially with recourse to women’s traditional crafts such as knitting and beekeeping (240). May’s inclusion of Plath in a text on how to survive and thrive in winter complicates the more tragic narratives surrounding the poet, which fixate on her suicide.

May credits British writer C. S. Lewis with being the inventor of “the Platonic ideal of snow: a thick, white, perfect layer over pine forests and quaint cottages” (192). The children in his novel, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), experience snow as “a sudden transformation,” and with it comes the potential for revolution and an overthrow of the old adult-centric order for a more childlike one, which is full of surprises (192). Both in literature and in real life, May enjoys the distractions, inconveniences, and wonders that a snowscape brings, as she feels that it enables her to be childlike and start anew.

Cailleach is one of the female deities who presides over the traditional Gaelic year. A hag goddess, she resumes a human shape every Halloween—originally named Samhain—and brings in the wild winds, weather, and landscape features of winter. She freezes the ground with a touch of her staff, and she formed Scotland’s mountains by dropping rocks and carving out valleys with a hammer. When Brighde the spring goddess takes over on Beltane at the beginning of May, Cailleach turns to stone and rests until Samhain again. For May, “Cailleach offers us a cyclical metaphor for life, one in which the energies of spring can arrive again and again, nurtured by the deep retreat of winter” (78). While this was a natural manner of thought for the Ancient Celts, today’s society imagines a chronological life path and is disappointed with anything other than a sunny narrative of continual progress.