Here in the Pacific Northwest, winter can test your mettle. Not through extreme cold or heavy snow, but through the steady accumulation of gray. Low light. Rain that rolls in from the Pacific and seems to soak deep into everything, including you.
Coming from Scotland, it’s a gentler version of the same journey. Warmer rain. More daylight. Higher cloud ceilings that don’t press down quite so hard. And then there are those PNW mist and fog days, when the hills soften, the woods glow green, and every tree seems wrapped in moss and lichen, quietly getting on with things.
On the clear breaks between weather systems, you take what you’re given. A stretch of sun feels like a gift, and you move quickly. Clearing up. Preparing for spring. Looking for signs. Bald eagles passing through. The first frog chorus at dusk. Maples swelling at the tips. Early bulbs pushing. Forsythia, camellia, edgeworthia — all holding their breath before blooming.
It’s a season of steady work and a slower pace. Tuber dividing. Rooted cuttings. Bench work that doesn’t ask much of you except patience and attention. You find yourself torn between wanting one more month and leaning forward toward spring’s real arrival.
That tension feels about right. Winter doesn’t rush you out the door, but it doesn’t let you stay idle either. It keeps things moving just slowly enough that you notice what’s changing.
Once the leaves are gone, you start to see the trees more clearly. Cottonwoods and maples lose their cover and what’s left is structure. Angles. Old decisions held in place. You can read where storms leaned on them, where light was chased year after year, where time took its turn. Nothing is hidden now, but nothing is explained either. This is just how they ended up this way.
The redwoods move slowly through winter, not drawing much attention to themselves. Their sway feels measured, steady, like they’ve seen this season plenty of times before. Douglas firs rise through the mixed stands, dark green among the bare branches. They don’t feel decorative. More like markers. Proof that not everything pulls back at once, that some things stay put and carry on.
As Christmas gets closer, I start bringing pine, fir, and cedar into the house. I used to do it earlier in the season, but evergreens don’t hold their needles or their scent for long in warm, dry air. Now I wait. Closer to solstice. When the house is still cool enough to let them last a few days. Saving the strongest green for the darkest part of the year seems fitting.
The kids still bring the excitement, even now. I’ve grown to like Christmas Eve more than the day itself. Christmas morning comes with a sharp burst of joy that almost guarantees a drop-off by afternoon. Christmas Eve stretches out differently. I spend most of the day in the kitchen. Music on. Movies drifting in and out. Kids spread around the table, working on cookies or gingerbread houses that lean and collapse like old barns. If the weather cooperates, a bonfire burns in the field, smoldering all day, sending a slow ribbon of smoke into the cold air.
Most of our little family traditions come and go, but the bonfire has stuck. Over a decade now. It started one foggy night years ago. I’d taken the boys driving around the neighborhoods near their school to look at the lights. Some houses wrapped neatly in white lights. Others blinking wildly in reds and greens. Inflatable snowmen bowing in the yard. Plastic reindeer frozen mid-leap. A few homes glowed softly through the windows, wreaths hung just right, the kind of places that made you slow down without knowing why.
By the time we headed back toward the farm, the valley fog had climbed the hill. The kids went quiet, watching the headlights dissolve into white. Then one of them asked, very seriously, whether Santa would be able to find the house. So when we got home, we lit a bonfire in the field. A steady flame. Something visible. A way to say we were here.
They’re more or less all teenagers now. The oldest only has a couple of years of high school left. The knowledge that there are only a few more versions of this particular Christmas sits quietly in the background. I don’t dwell on it. I just notice it’s there.
Winter also sharpens your eye for light. Shadows start to matter. Light moves between rose canes, across basement walls, through windows, catching dust in bright shards of afternoon air. You realize how little is needed for something to feel beautiful. A breeze through bare branches. A long stretch of low sun. The ordinary showing itself once the distractions drop away.
Some creatures follow the sun south, but the ones that stay feel closer now, as if we’re all moving through the same narrow days together. Jays stand out in their blue against moss and lichen on hawthorn branches, a color that would disappear in summer. Sapsuckers move between pale willow skin and dark, ridged red pine, flashing red backs and white bellies as they argue over territory that no longer hides them. Above it all, the red-tailed hawk keeps watch, steady and unhurried, treating winter like familiar ground.
Where summer once pressed in as a wall of green, the forest opens. You can see past deer working the last crabapples, through peeling cherry bark, cottonwoods, vine maples, all the way to the big red cedars above the deep creek beyond. As the sun drops lower, light threads its way through the trunks and carries your eye farther still, until the distant lights of town come into view.
The season teaches restraint, without drawing attention to itself. It shows that abundance isn’t required for meaning. That growth doesn’t always look like expansion. Sometimes it looks like standing still long enough to see what was already there. Like a mind settled by quiet.
Winter rarely asks for admiration. Mostly it asks for patience and rest. And if you’re willing to give it that, it offers something that feels harder to come by in our world of noise.
A clearer view.
