I’m from Chicago, where no one walks anywhere. Non-natives often don’t believe me. But it’s a city, they say. To which I reply: It’s a big city—sprawling, and its edges are as car-dependent as any suburb. This means that when I walk near my parents’ house, only rarely do I encounter anyone, even in early mornings and evenings, when people are home from work. I usually do a loop around the local Catholic college’s campus. Sometimes I catch only a distant glimpse of a lone dog-walker. Usually it’s just me, the campus geese, and a stone statue of Mary with a tender look on her carved face.
I live in New York now, and the only time my ambulatory solitude is comparable is when it snows in great quantities, something that happened twice this winter. The city shuts down almost entirely. During the big storm in February, the mayor banned all but “essential” vehicles on the roads, the Trader Joe’s shelves were cleaned out citywide, and visitors were left stuck in my living room, their flights canceled.
The city also shuts down locally. During the second snowfall, I walked a mile home and encountered maybe five people. On a clear day I might have seen one hundred. As I neared my apartment, I stopped: There was a strange sound, a buzzing, a lack, a silence. The people were holed up in their apartments, the cars were tucked in, and the snow on the ground was absorbing any ambient noise.
Winter in New York is truly terrible. You do all of the same stuff you do in the warmer months—bars, parties, ball games—but you feel colder, with frozen knees and a red-tipped nose and fingers. Still, snowbound New York is my favorite microseason: The city that never sleeps is forced to at least take a nap. Snowfall makes the city relax, sometimes kicking and screaming, into a sort of Sabbath.
In the creation narrative of Genesis, there is no mention of seasons. I like to think that this is because winter is the sinner’s season. When God created vegetation he did so lushly: “Let the earth bring forth the green herb, and such as may seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, which may have seed in itself upon the earth.” There are no bare branches here.
Does winter exist only in a fallen world? When Jesus foretells the destruction of the temple in Matthew, he warns the people to pray that it falls neither on the Sabbath nor in winter; if it does, it will be a time of particular tribulation. But there is an ameliorative element to winter too. In Isaiah, God says that while His people’s sins are scarlet, they shall soon be “as white as snow.” Snow may be cold, but it is cleansing.
I have to wonder if we were better at keeping the Sabbath before the industrial era. The seasons are more present when fire is your only source of heat, you aren’t wearing head-to-toe fleece, and you can’t just stop into the nearest coffee shop for a hot drink. Cabin fever is no fun, of course. But I imagine that in older days people had more forced periods of rest, Sundays compounded with night compounded with winter.
Compare that to now, when it’s possible to always be doing something. I actually have a not-pessimistic view of this: People remain curious, entranced by pretty things, and, at least where I live, full of energy. But as my mother—and Mother Church—will often remind me, it is also good to not do something. “For you, my Lord, my soul in stillness waits,” the hymn says. Indeed, it is difficult to wait well while moving.
But the waiting pays off. When I walk in Chicago around Easter, the wind still burns my nose, but—there! A sprout of tulip, a shoot of hyacinth, a whisper of a daffodil. And Mary’s stone face, shadowed by the tangerine sun, almost seems to smile.
I’m from Chicago, where no one walks anywhere. Non-natives often don’t believe me. But it’s a city, they say. To which I reply: It’s a big city—sprawling, and its edges are as car-dependent as any suburb. This means that when I walk near my parents’ house, only rarely do I encounter anyone, even in early mornings and evenings, when people are home from work. I usually do a loop around the local Catholic college’s campus. Sometimes I catch only a distant glimpse of a lone dog-walker. Usually it’s just me, the campus geese, and a stone statue of Mary with a tender look on her carved face.
I live in New York now, and the only time my ambulatory solitude is comparable is when it snows in great quantities, something that happened twice this winter. The city shuts down almost entirely. During the big storm in February, the mayor banned all but “essential” vehicles on the roads, the Trader Joe’s shelves were cleaned out citywide, and visitors were left stuck in my living room, their flights canceled.
The city also shuts down locally. During the second snowfall, I walked a mile home and encountered maybe five people. On a clear day I might have seen one hundred. As I neared my apartment, I stopped: There was a strange sound, a buzzing, a lack, a silence. The people were holed up in their apartments, the cars were tucked in, and the snow on the ground was absorbing any ambient noise.
Winter in New York is truly terrible. You do all of the same stuff you do in the warmer months—bars, parties, ball games—but you feel colder, with frozen knees and a red-tipped nose and fingers. Still, snowbound New York is my favorite microseason: The city that never sleeps is forced to at least take a nap. Snowfall makes the city relax, sometimes kicking and screaming, into a sort of Sabbath.
In the creation narrative of Genesis, there is no mention of seasons. I like to think that this is because winter is the sinner’s season. When God created vegetation he did so lushly: “Let the earth bring forth the green herb, and such as may seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, which may have seed in itself upon the earth.” There are no bare branches here.
Does winter exist only in a fallen world? When Jesus foretells the destruction of the temple in Matthew, he warns the people to pray that it falls neither on the Sabbath nor in winter; if it does, it will be a time of particular tribulation. But there is an ameliorative element to winter too. In Isaiah, God says that while His people’s sins are scarlet, they shall soon be “as white as snow.” Snow may be cold, but it is cleansing.
I have to wonder if we were better at keeping the Sabbath before the industrial era. The seasons are more present when fire is your only source of heat, you aren’t wearing head-to-toe fleece, and you can’t just stop into the nearest coffee shop for a hot drink. Cabin fever is no fun, of course. But I imagine that in older days people had more forced periods of rest, Sundays compounded with night compounded with winter.
Compare that to now, when it’s possible to always be doing something. I actually have a not-pessimistic view of this: People remain curious, entranced by pretty things, and, at least where I live, full of energy. But as my mother—and Mother Church—will often remind me, it is also good to not do something. “For you, my Lord, my soul in stillness waits,” the hymn says. Indeed, it is difficult to wait well while moving.
But the waiting pays off. When I walk in Chicago around Easter, the wind still burns my nose, but—there! A sprout of tulip, a shoot of hyacinth, a whisper of a daffodil. And Mary’s stone face, shadowed by the tangerine sun, almost seems to smile.
