Photo by Lyubov Chigrinskaya on Unsplash

Years ago, I stood in a crocus field in Holland. Our bulb farmer friend showed us the heating pipes that ran under the acres of rows of dirt. These heaters boosted the soil temperature for crocuses to give them a jump start on their competitors.

But before that luxurious spring came winter. Our friend showed us the buildings with huge coolers that forced winter on the bulbs. He explained how essential it is that the crocus corms were kept at a specific cold for a specific length of time. Without this carefully- designed winter, the crocuses wouldn’t produce well later even in their deluxe spring bed heaters.

I often think about that compulsory winter for the wrinkled little bulbs, and I wonder about my seasons and my flourishing.

Right now, it’s winter above the equator and it’s a beautiful one. Every morning I thank God for warmth and light and health and quietness–gifts that many in the world don’t have. For months, I got to watch the black sky turn to periwinkle then I put on boots and many layers of clothes and walked to work in fluffy snow. It was like a storybook. Ok, sometimes now it’s slush, not snow, but still. This winter has treated us exceptionally well.

Some of the best moments were when I walked in falling snow. Or made a snow angel then stayed and watched downy flakes fall and fall on me. It was so quiet relaxing, I understood why one would want to curl up in a snowbank for a nap.

This winter kept on being beautiful. But winter isn’t always white and peaceful, either outside the house or inside the heart. Sometimes more accurate words for winter are

• bleak
• howling
• dark
• ghostly
• empty
• ugly
• parched
• barren

Winter can be a season in the calendar or of the soul. It is never warm breezes and pink blossoms. I see no beauty in gray, bare stalks and trees. I find no joy in husks of stems and leaves, mud, and thick clouds at high noon. Winter feels like wasted time, pointless, empty, and, worst of all, ugly.

I have found no fast cure, no quick ticket to a warm spring and billows of blossoms. Winter is a season, a rhythm that comes and goes without my permission. I can only control my response to it. So, after many years of resenting winter’s darkness, I’ve come to try to befriend its hostility.

I bought a long down-filled coat and ear muffs and when I wrap my scarf around my neck and face, the cold can hardly get me. I light candles and read and drink tea. Or host friends or bake bread to give away. Or go to bed early. Or play with watercolors or words.

It’s a mindset I learned from Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May. She explained how Scandinavians in their long winters make the most of the season instead of fighting it. Since it’s going to be dark, they insist on cozy lights. Since it’s going to be cold, they wear warm layers and snow boots. That approach has changed my life in northwestern Pennsylvania where winter stays for six months.

In melodramatic moments, I say that we’re in the Arctic Circle and sometimes see penguins. My impatience comes from having lived in Ireland where daffodils bloomed in late January and now I have to wait until at least April. But I also experienced SAD there and those winters were dark and rainy and I wanted to run away to Spain or Italy every winter.

The good thing about seasons is that they don’t stay. And they are part of a life cycle. Winter is not empty time, but a space to go still, like a seed underground. Winter is the creator’s answer to the longing to bloom. Winter quiets the seed, nests it safe, protects it from death while it rests. The husk of the seed does die. Death is part of winter but it is for the purpose of life.

Stillness and quietness works for seeds and people and their fruitfulness.

Have you noticed it? The people you know who are most luminous now have known long, cold, brutal winter in previous seasons. They had no timeline, no calendar to know when spring was coming. They couldn’t see progress or change in that darkness, but underneath all the layers, even in the dark and cold, life hadn’t stopped. The roots hadn’t withered.

I don’t say that glibly. Spring is hard-won. Winter seasons are intensely difficult, demanding, distressing—how many other D words?—dangerous, depressing, debilitating, dark, depleting, deserted.

Being chirpy about winter isn’t helpful. But it helps me to name what is true. And it helps me to know, in a dark season of famine and barrenness, that it won’t always be this way, that spring comes eventually. At some point, I know, water will trickle again instead of freezing.

Let me tell you an unbelievable secret. It’s so astounding, I have to whisper it because it’s so hard to believe. Last week it was zero degrees and as I walked gingerly over ice and snow beside the pear trees, I saw tiny swollen brave buds pushing out of the twiggy branches.

How is it possible? Buds when it’s below freezing?

There is something thrumming down deep out of sight, silent and stubborn: the insistence of life, the throb of light pulsing in the sap and bark and roots. Gnarled twigs hold veins of liquid that circulates in response to the lengthening frigid days.

Light will always be stronger than dark, sending warmth and vitality to the most hidden places. Even in the Artic Circle, the polar night shortens and daylight cautiously emerges. That mechanical Dutch winter those wrinkled, lumpy crocus corms endured became their route to flower.

I’m so curious about what fruits and flowers are ahead of us.

I keep asking God to grow my trust in Him. It’s been my recurring prayer this year. Then He sent me a hummingbird.

One day in late summer at my second story office, something kept flying in and out of my peripheral vision around the pear tree outside the window. When I stopped to look, I saw it was a hummingbird, and it perched on a branch that pointed toward me about fifteen away.

I called my coworkers to come see, and did anyone have a set of binoculars? The next morning, Sheldon brought his pair and we could see the little bird was clearly building a nest.

I can tell you that I watched a busy little hummingbird make her nest, but then I choke up and my eyes start leaking. I don’t have words to explain how beautiful it was to watch her. She zipped in and out all day, just outside my window.

A neighboring family from church—five little ones and their mom, avid bird lovers—brought their binoculars one day to watch. They told me she would build her nest from moss and spiderwebs.

Sure enough. When Danny*, my co-worker across the hall, got his big camera to capture the action, he caught a shot of a wisp of web on her bill and extra spider webs stockpiled beside the nest.

July 25, 2024

She used her bill to shape and punch and work her nest. She sat in it and scooched around in it to shape its bed. She used lichens from the tree for the outside of the bowl, which was a splendid camouflage. Often when people came to see the nest, it was hard for them to find it because the whites, grays, and greens looked just like the branches surrounding it. Her own green back matched the leaves around her. She was very watchful as she worked, constantly on the look-out.

I watched her build for two weeks. My eyes learned to know exactly where to look, and how to direct others’ eyes to find her. I watched for her partner with his ruby throat, but he never showed up. These are not romantic birds, I understand. Maybe it’s those bills.

Then she sat on the nest for two weeks. The nest was nearly eye level to us, and we wished we could look down into the nest to see the eggs, but we never could. It seemed significant that she usually faced away from my window and toward the tree trunk. I wondered if she felt that direction held her greatest threat, and our brick building with rows of windows felt safe enough to not keep an eye on it.

She was a distraction and many brain breaks and a deep message to me. She was teaching me something about how it looks to rest and trust. I wondered if she knew how small she was and how big the sky is, but she didn’t seem bothered. I couldn’t possibly survive in the wild like her, but I got a front row seat to watching her manage and thrive.

The eggs hatched on August  21 and she started feeding her two babies! It was unbelievable. How was it safe to poke her bill deep into her babies’ mouths? Where was her partner? How could she feed her babies alone?

September 2, 2024

September 3, 2024

Apparently, hummingbirds eat insects in addition to nectar, but still, how is it possible to supply the babies’ growing metabolisms and get them and herself ready to migrate? How can the little mites fly 1,000’s of miles south so soon?

September 3, 2024

Eventually, it looked like the babies were spilling out of the nest. We kept wondering how they practice flying.

September 3, 2024

We never saw the first one leave. Then there was one left. It perched on the edge of the nest and whirred its wings into a blur on and off for a whole day. The next morning, while Danny and I were watching, it hopped onto several branches surrounding the nest, then zoomed away. It took maybe fifteen seconds for it to hop out and decide to fly. We never saw any of them again.

I look out at that tiny, hidden nest every day and I miss that sweet little mama and her babies. I’m not a birder, but she was an immense gift to me this summer. She didn’t understand big words like camouflage or regurgitate or migrate but she knew what to do. In that nest, she rested and trusted something bigger than her.

This summer, it just happened that I noticed her graceful swoops to and from the pear tree. It just happened that I work across the hall from someone who likes wildlife photography and has the equipment for it. It just happened that another neighbor had binoculars that could sit on my window sill for six weeks. It just happened that a plucky little single-parent hummingbird chose a branch that made my office window the best vantage point. It just happened that Danny and I got to watch the last fledgling leave.

Now the leaves in the pear tree are slowly turning red and orange. It’s time for a new season. I understand that hummingbirds won’t come back to their old nest and I’m sad. But this season of watching those birds taught me something deep that I’m still mulling.

I asked for deeper trust and He sent me a hummingbird.

*Thanks to Danny for the wonderful pictures!

Once at the edge of a crowded Dublin sidewalk, I was waiting for the crosswalk. Just as the pedestrian light turned red, I started to step off the curb, intending to cross quickly before the traffic started. A tall man beside me put out his arm to stop me. His elbow grazed my shoulder. “The man who made time made plenty of it,” he said. I laughed, chastened with his Irish humor and forthright advice.

Turning 50 turned me both pensive and excited about time. We have plenty of it, yes.  But time is a weird part of life that we can’t ever get enough of, and yet we’re sad we have it (At least, sometimes. It’s fashionable at some birthdays to be sad about another year.)

I feel an odd mix of exhilaration and bewilderment, and the puzzling compounds when people say they can’t believe I’m 50. “I’d have guessed you about 34 or 36,” they say, and they’re right: that’s how old I feel. But numbers don’t lie, and the math says 1974-2024=50. And what do my friends really mean? That I don’t act my age? How does 50 look? How does 50 live?

My cousin’s 12-year old thought I’m younger than his mom. I can understand him. I don’t have a husband or children, which is how one’s timeline unspools in his world, so to him, I’m just not old enough yet to have a family.

But there’s something in the wider air, beyond his cozy farming community, that doesn’t make sense to me. The math doesn’t work. It’s this:

Everyone is supposed to become the best version of themselves, grow, learn, develop, be all you can be. BUT don’t grow at the expense of becoming old.

Even if we don’t want grandmothers to be dressing like teenagers, we still have this deference for youth and beauty that we’re loathe to lose.

Youth and beauty are wonderful in their time. I live and work around 20-year-olds, and I love their wit and perspectives. But I LOVE being 50 and not 20! I have much to learn and hold many questions, but these 50  years have given me so, so much that I benefit from, give out of, and I would never want to go back to a smaller number.

Some mornings, though, it’s disconcerting to look in the mirror and see more gray hair, or to notice wrinkly skin on my hands. I don’t love that, or the gap in my grin because one year took a tooth. But when I take stock of the richness of my years, I can’t resent the gray and wrinkles. And I have seen repeatedly how a plain face becomes beautiful with a smile, and I don’t think my smile has to sag for a very long time.

Partly because I think 50 is cool, and partly because I want to push against the worship of youth and beauty, I started celebrating my 50th birthday for the full year before my birthday, and past it. Because why not? I started by going to a wonderful concert in Carnegie Hall and wrote briefly about it here. I bought raspberry batik fabric to make a dress that I love wearing. I went to Greece for three beautiful weeks. I’m going to another concert with another friend in August. There were other planned celebrations, and there might be more. Someone said these were excuses to do something, but I said turning fifty is a REASON, not an excuse to celebrate.

We don’t celebrate enough. I’m sure of it. Our Germanic genes make us too efficient and task-oriented to put effort into taking time to reflect and enjoy the end or beginning of a decade or a summer or a week or an accomplishment. We think we don’t have time, but the man who made time made plenty of it. When I think about how long God has been patient with me, and how many days and years He waits to ripen His purposes, I realize that He isn’t a bit concerned about time or efficiency. Remembering this helps me calm down and breathe deep and wait on whatever He’s up to.

I’ve earned these grey hair and wrinkles. A lot of tears and weights and waiting came before them. I can still be unreasonably chirpy, but I hope I’m a little more measured and thoughtful than I use to be. Fifty years have been very kind and beautiful to me, and I am grateful beyond words.

I wrote this poem last year in anticipation of turning 50:

Nut-brown silk wrapped
Smooth over knuckles,
Gapped grin in line of white,
Silver filaments framing face—
These parts of portraits
Plot a stretch of time,
Paint my story line
Of years, quick and slow,
Rich and deep and variegated, full.

This sagging silk? That dark spot?
They show my days stacked high
Of treasures found in hummocky shamrock fields,
Incandescent faces, glowing coves,
Humming train platforms,
Quiet words and bonfires,
Endless tea and steaming curries and
Tablescapes and holding hands for prayer.

The years and wrinkles converge, collect
To sketch a picture deep beyond
Cosmetics, profile, cursory glance.
Numbers only mark a page.
Wrinkles only touch a face.
My pulse glows calm, claims this age,
And names my story
Very good.