The Up Side of Winter

Driving up-Island last weekend, I was enjoying the view. Winter colors here could be described as drab or, if you're a Pollyanna like me, you could say they're subtle. Oak leaves tend to stay attached to the trees through the colder months, they hang there brown and wrinkled. But this year the oaks dropped a bumper crop of acorns, so the deer are fat and happy. The ocean contrasts nicely with the grays and browns of the landscape - on sunny days it's sapphire blue, on stormy days it's gunmetal silver. The varied greens and golds of the marshes are more pronounced when the sun is lower in the sky and sunsets can be spectacular. Another advantage of the bare trees is that we can now see those houses hidden in the woods - they're lost in the Summer. There's nothing more warming than driving past occupied homes on a frosty night and seeing well lit domestic scenes: supper on a kitchen table, someone reading by the woodstove... Thanks folks for leaving your shades up! Traffic? What traffic? We have parking spaces galore; want a ferry reservation - no problem! We can pull out of our driveway with nary a look. We joke that tumbleweeds blow down Circuit Avenue. Speaking of jokes, forgive me if I stray from my usual repressed parochial school vocabulary for this standard Island joke: The tourist says to the Islander, "What do you do here in the Winter?" The Islanders says, "Well, in the Summer we fish and we f**k; in the Winter we don't fish".