"A hell of a night for a walk," the man I meet on the sidewalk says. It is dark and cold and we are both covered in so many layers of clothing that we would not know each other, even if we had met before, which we probably have. Both of us are walking fast, fast enough to make our own heat. The stars are crisp and the snow is, too. When winter like this sets in, I measure the temperature by the kind of squeak beneath my feet. It is very squeaky tonight. The closest I can come to taking a picture of cold like this, is the frost on my front windows. Still, I am walking each night, just me and the man who thinks it is hellish. Which it could be, were it not for the infinite sky - Orion striding southward, the moon a waning crescent, the crunch of my feet carrying me quickly through all this darkness. As I walk, a children's poem by Oliver Herford, sings in my head and I speak it out loud, the words muffled by my scarf:
I heard a bird sing
in the dark of December,
a magical thing
and sweet to remember.
We are nearer to spring
than we were in September,
I heard a bird sing
in the dark of December.
Later, in the night, sleeping, I dream of that bird - a shadow of a bird, really, perched on the bare branches of one of the trees I walk beneath each night. It is cold, but he is singing and I am walking. I cannot hear his song, my ears are covered, but his beak is open, cloudy puffs of song float from it, and I know he is singing, "WE ARE NEARER TO SPRING THAN WE WERE IN SEPTEMBER. . . "
It is the winter Solstice - shortest day of the year, longest night. This is a summer picture of light on my sunroom floor. It will be months before the sun again shines at an angle which gives me these kind of shadows, but from this day forward, we begin tilting towards the light. Today the sun rose at 8:24 a.m. and set at 4:30 p.m. which means 8 hours and 6 minutes of day, 15 hours and 54 minutes of night. No wonder I am searching my files, looking for pictures of light, no wonder the little stone angel in my backyard is facing the east and warming a little bird in her hands. She is actually missing one wing and a halo, so she is kind of stuck here, with the rest of us, watching shadows change, doing mental math with minutes of sunlight. We have only a little fresh snow on the ground. Until recently it has been too cold for snow, but today, at noon, the sun was shining at just the right angle to make the new flakes sparkle. We look for light where we can find it. 
