The Darkest Season
The wind comes shrieking from the north-west. The oak and olive trees shiver violently and the eaves shutter and groan — anything not nailed down blows into the fields, lost in the brush. The months between now and May stack up like a brutal endurance test. Winter here is a rainy season, and the mud in Portugal is sticky like glue. Every morning and evening as we feed the horses, then clean up after them, we wade ankle deep — the wheelbarrows threatening to become stuck or their wheels to come off. Everything slowly becomes splotched and covered in mud - even clothes that have been nowhere near the horse paddocks or the goat and chicken yards. We come in from our chores with the stuff in our hair, in our ears, under our nails and down our shirts. I suppose the amount of effort expended on working a farm prevents one from noticing how much of it is spraying around while one goes about one’s labors.
In the afternoons everyone naps — the people, the dogs and cats and goats — possibly the horses. I am unable to sleep during the day, but I lay down like everyone else. I lay down, cover my eyes, put in earphones and listen to background noise — wind in the trees, rivers, rain, crackling fires — it drowns out the hum of all things electric, and can sometimes buffer the afternoon canine choir rehearsal. Now that the rains are here I have no need of the ear phones — it patters down, playing the roof like an instrument, and already the shoots of spring flowers are climbing up in the pastures and fields. By March the scarlet poppies will have raised their shameless heads against the rain, and the purple heather and pale yellow wild daffodils. Even now, in cold December, there are still wild flowers in bloom: small lavender and yellow and pink petals — and the nêspera tree blooms, opening the large white flowers over many slow, cold weeks. All day, even in the rain, the tree sings with hundreds of foraging bees, while in the front garden the orange trees are filled with ripening fruit, and the lemon trees not far behind: their hard, green jewels slowly graduating into canary, one watercolor splotch of bright yellow at a time.
This week we put up the Christmas trees and hung strands of lights. It is the lights I love most about the season — so many garlands strung in peoples' yards, or around lamp posts and gutters and fences. Strung with care and design, or thrown in sloppy tangles on a random bush — I love them all. The lights and the color of the fruit trees are friends as we approach the shortest day of the year. Anything that suggests warmth gives us in the mud and the drizzle, reassurance. It sings of life and thriving, and it brings about a brief sense of being warmed. I had never understood why, growing up, we always received oranges at Christmas Eve service. Now I see that they ripen in December, and as people of every persuasion celebrate the returning light, the oranges — like little personal suns — are a reminder of light, of warmth and the promise of life. These are the things I meditate on as I sit in the afternoons, watching the rain come and go. Watching the deep sky as it rearranges its many layers: black, gray, cobalt, violet and lavender — and when the time is right — scarlet, tangerine, fuchsia, peach and rose. These are the things I contemplate as I watch the earth doing its work, knowing that there is no rush — that I too can do my work here, silently, without rush, plodding along like the trees or the birds — a part of it all. A patient bud, slowly growing through the darkest season.