December is a month of transformation for me. January too. They mean snow. They mean cold. They signify the incipience of the ending of the circle that is a year. Again, we have ridden the circumference of its course. I try to measure what the accumulation of events in the context of a year mean, what they stand for and constitute and the scale breaks, the ruler snaps.

Last January (2011) I was sitting in Buckeye Donuts in Columbus, Ohio and overheard a man tell another man that he wasn’t sure if he was going to make it through the winter. Both men had conventional winter hats on and were blowing breath into hands recently relinquished of their gloves. The man who was listening at first assured the man who was speaking first that, indeed, they would make it through the winter—with some beer and football and a little getting-together, yes—they would make it through. For whatever reason, his words stayed with me that day. Out of every conversation you overhear most get sent to (what I like to believe is) the equivalent of a trash can or external hard drive for a computer—recoverable, but (probably, eventually, inevitably) forgotten. Not like yeah, man, we got it bad. Winter… And not that I find savior-like warmth in beer and football. Far from it. But there is something to be said about the snow, the cold.

We cold-snow-blessed Midwesterners of a certain latitude get something that those non-snow-cold-blessed don’t. An endurance. A promise. Some combination of sadness/fatalism amalgamated with joy/carefully-calculated will. We have to get through something. There are distinct obstacles to our days. We use moments of time to tie a scarf, shovel a sidewalk, pull on gloves, or blow breath in our hands—moments that we might otherwise use doing other things. We take time. That’s what December directs me to reflect on. Time. We slow down. What we assume about traveling through our days gets deconstructed. We follow our breath and feel warmth so much more fully.

In our hibernation of sorts we have dreams that tell us who we will be when it’s time to wake up. And we do wake up—in March or April or May—changed inexorably, punctuated by the seasons of the Midwest.