winter
For about a month now we have had solid cold—firm, business-like cold that stalked in and took charge of the countryside as a brisk housewife might take charge of someone else’s kitchen in an emergency.
“Cold Weather,” in One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1944), 346.
Just to live in New England in winter is a full-time job; you don’t have to “do” anything. The idle pursuit of making-a-living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.
“A Report in January,” in Essays of E. B. White (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 46.
My garden is all covered up by snow; picked gilliflower Tuesday, now gilliflowers are asleep. The hills take off their purple frocks, and dress in long white nightgowns.
The Letters of Emily Dickinson vol 2, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 228.