Winter

It’s January and the witch hazel, one of my very favorite trees, is in full bloom. My husband Alex and I visited them at the Bloedel Reserve earlier in the month while Bainbridge Island was in the clutch of its annual deep freeze. Bloedel Reserve is a 140 acre estate built by the Bloedel family in the early 1900s that today operates as a non-profit providing “a premier public garden of natural land and designed Pacific Northwest landscapes.” As members, we’ve had the privilege of experiencing the reserve throughout the seasons across a number of years.

This year’s freeze was a little deeper than average: it was fourteen degrees when we buttoned, zipped, wrapped, and cinched ourselves into some of our warmest layers and left the shelter of our car. We were giddy with the absurdity of it.

We saw a sharply dressed man with an expensive camera eyeing the treeline and the clear sky beyond it from his front seat as we crossed the nearly empty parking lot. We didn’t see him again. 

The blooming witch hazel greeted us for the first time in the parking lot and again and again throughout our walk. 

Twenty minutes in, where a trail ended at a view of the Sound and the North Cascades beyond, we saw another guest, the only one we crossed paths with for the entirety of our visit. “Hearty souls,” she applauded us, eyes sparkling from beneath a knit cap and tightly wrapped scarf. “Lovely day for a walk,” she added, marching by. 

A brisk wind blew off the water. The mountains shone with fresh snow. It was not a day to stop and chat. But at the same time, it didn’t feel like a day to miss. 

The leaves of the rhododendron were rimed with hoar frost. The ground heaved on elongated ice crystals that collapsed in a satisfying crunch as we walked on them, each footfall sinking an inch or two beyond the brain’s anticipation—tiny, repeated thrills. The splash pools of the miniature falls that tumble along the creek in places from the high bank of the main property to the low bank closer to the salt water froze in beautiful, voluptuous shapes. A trio of yearling deer huddled on a hillock near the teahouse. Impossibly perfect ringed ice filled a small pond dotting the moss garden. It was all so beautiful.

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“We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer and that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves,” writes Wintering author Katherine May. 

My senses, finely tuned to pleasure, find winter lacking when compared to summer. It’s less sweet, certainly; the animal and insect choruses are largely absent; absent too are the smells of summer—cut grass, the perfume of wild roses along the water; the warmth of sun on bare skin, perhaps my favorite feeling in the world, is hard to come by; and color loses its saturation in winter—everything dulls, even my hair and skin.

“We dream of an equatorial habitat,” writes May, “forever close to the sun, an endless, unvarying high season. But life’s not like that.” May writes about a figurative winter, one that mirrors a literal one in its bleakness, one that inevitably comes and maybe even returns regularly in a life.

Her point being that winter, whether we’re talking literally or figuratively, is hard. It’s natural that we orient toward summer. But, simply put, winter is. “Even if by some extraordinary stroke of self-control and good luck we were able to keep control of our own health and happiness for an entire lifetime,” she writes, “we still couldn’t avoid the winter.” 

Learning to live well through winter, then, is a worthwhile pursuit. 

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Life needs winter. As I’ve directed my attention toward this understanding my appreciation for the season has grown. Plants require periods of dormancy ahead of growth seasons, time to muster energy and resources, and that dormancy is cued by decreases in light and temperature. There are hibernating animals who essentially do the same, sleeping through the scarcity of winter.

In our modern world we can, by myriad technological advances—HVAC systems, air travel, artificial light, the combination of agriculture, transportation, and refrigeration—essentially bypass winter. But surely the microcosm of life that is a human must too need winter, must also have genetically coded behaviors and adaptations for survival in this season. I’ve been wondering recently what naturally happens to us in winter and what happens when we avoid it.

While the experiment needs repeating to verify its findings, a 2023 sleep study in Berlin mapped participants’ sleep patterns throughout the year to observe seasonal changes. The study demonstrated that our sleep architecture—that is the progression of NREM and REM sleep we cycle through multiple times each night—changes throughout the year and suggests that, as a result, we “adjust sleep habits to season.” Participants in this study, on average, slept an hour more per night in the winter than the summer, including an additional 30 minutes per night in REM sleep [note 1].  REM sleep is requisite for memory formation, emotional processing, and brain development [note 2], and it seems when we’re attuned to the decrease in availability of natural light and the associated increase in sleep opportunity in winter, we get more of it. 

A 2014 National Institute of Health paper demonstrated human adaptability to winter—specifically mild cold stress and caloric scarcity—across cultures and history [note 3]. “One might conceptually associate winter's cold, dark, and still environment as a natural balance to summer's warm, bright, and active environment,” write the authors. They note that increased sleep in cool environments without the effects of artificial light “work synergistically to promote the conservation of valuable calories in a time of year when they are naturally scarce.” 

The paper goes on to explain a suite of physiological mechanisms known as “longevity genes” that are only activated by the stressors of winter—in this instance what doesn’t kill us truly makes us stronger. 

But when you put it all together with the way we live today, it spells disease. The paper links obesity and cardiometabolic diseases with the lack of winter conditions in modern environments:

It appears that we have an evolutionary discordance between our biology that evolved to counter seasonal calorie scarcity and mild cold stress and our modern world of ubiquitous calories and excess warmth…Our 7-million-year evolutionary path was dominated by two seasonal challenges—calorie scarcity and mild cold stress. In the last 0.9 inches of our evolutionary mile, we solved them both…[but] obesity and chronic disease are seen most often in people and the animals (pets) they keep warm and overnourished. Similar to the circadian cycle and like most other living organisms, it is reasonable to believe we also respond to the seasons and carry with us the survival genes for winter. Maybe our problem is that winter never comes.

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I want the kind of attachment to my place that welcomes its winter. I want to experience winter for the presence that it is, not simply the absence of summer. 

When I attune my senses to what is here in this season, I find it has a signature all its own: its spices and the delicious ways we combine them to keep us warm; the sound of rain on the metal roof and the canopy beyond, the great horned owl who has taken up residence in the ravine that borders our home and calls to us for hours on end some nights; the scents of aromatic wood fire and the sharpness of cedar; the feeling of striking out in the wet cold, chilled to the bone in seconds but warming slowly as the body, evolved for just such challenges, adapts to the conditions; soothing, monochromatic palettes with infinite variations on the theme winter.

There is, of course, a relationship between experiencing a place throughout the seasons and the depth of attachment available to that place. “Seasonal visitors have a developing yet still weak bond [to place] called a partial sense of place that includes positive feelings without a commitment to stay” [note 4].

“Partial sense of place” is not what I’m after; the quality of place attachment I want to foster in myself is simply not available without a commitment to stay. And since it seems it’s not only a deeper sense of place attachment that winter here gifts me, but also a physiological and emotional resilience, the kind that only comes about by exposure to winter’s stressors, I’m learning to embrace it. There’s a sense of resolution this season invites, an appraisal of the frozen expanse and a confident, “I know how to dress for this.”

Even so, winter has a way of imposing its limitations. Layered as we were, we lasted for only forty minutes on our recent excursion at Bloedel Reserve—by far our briefest visit to date. It may just prove to also be the most memorable.

Notes:

Seidler, A, Weihrich, KS, Bes, F, de Zeeuw, J, Kunz, D. “Seasonality of human sleep: Polysomnographic data of a neuropsychiatric sleep clinic.” Frontiers in Neuroscience. February 17, 2023. Accessed on January 27, 2024. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2023.1105233/full

Summer, J, Singh, A. “REM Sleep Revealed: Enhance Your Sleep Quality.” The Sleep Foundation. Accessed on January 27, 2024. https://www.sleepfoundation.org/stages-of-sleep/rem-sleep#:~:text=REM%20sleep%20is%20characterized%20by,%2C%20brain%20development%2C%20and%20dreaming.

Cronise, RJ, Sinclair, DA, and Bremer, AA. “The ‘Metabolic Winter’ Hypothesis: A Cause of the Current Epidemics of Obesity and Cardiometabolic Disease.” September 1, 2014. National Library of Medicine. Accessed on January 27, 2024. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4209489/

 Scannell, L. and R. Gifford. “The Psychology of Place Attachment.” Environmental Psychology: Principles and Practice, 5 ed. January 2014. Accessed on January 27, 2024. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279718543_The_psychology_of_place_attachment