This morning, driving to his birthday lunch, my husband and I were talking about how, despite the fact that time does seem to be going faster and faster the older we get, January 2026 was somehow 10 full years long.
“I can’t even remember Christmas,” my daughter piped from the back seat.
Sunday, Feb. 1, marked Imbolc, a Gaelic holiday celebrating the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox — the beginning of the end of winter — the sun slowly finding its way back to us, the night losing the battle by a few more seconds every day. Traditions associated with the holiday include watching for serpents or badgers to emerge from their winter dens. This was believed to be a harbinger of warm weather. The tradition may, in fact, have been a forerunner of the North American Groundhog Day.
So, there you have it: We are ASTRONOMICALLY halfway through winter. I put astronomically in all caps because, while from a planetary perspective we are halfway through, winter storms often arrive here on the western plains well into April and even May. Meaning, we are, at best, a quarter of the way through winter, and if February feels anything like January did, we have another arduous month ahead.
This obviously isn’t just, or even mostly, because of the weather. As has been the case for years now, having grown up in urban “blue” places and now living in a rural “red” place, I am daily confronted by the ideological divides that once seemed merely differences of opinion about governance, and are now quite clearly much more than that. What we are facing as a country feels just as intractable as the frozen soil that stretches as far as the eye can see. When the cold is this deep, it is hard to imagine it will ever be spring.
I wrote at the beginning of January about a new project called “Keeping Kith: Field Notes from the Prairie.” Each episode was going to be recorded outdoors — while I was with the flock, in the barn or walking across the prairie — and left unedited on purpose. I wouldn’t clean up the wind noises. I wouldn’t remove the bird song or the sheep baaaaaaas or the long pauses. Whatever arrived got to stay.
The result, I hoped, would be a series that felt intimate, surprising and alive, part listening exercise, part quiet companionship, because these aren’t abstract ideas, but felt practices that reflect what it means to be in a reciprocal relationship with the living world.
I’ve recorded and released several episodes, each time wondering if this is the work the world needs me to be making right now. The truth is, while I love making these episodes and sharing these little slices of prairie life with whomever wants to listen in, it’s hard to know what to do about anything.
Then yesterday, after a week of deep, bone-cracking cold, a midwinter thaw arrived, carried by the chinook wind…and suddenly there are puddles, the smell of mud, the sense memory of warmth, the freedom to throw off our winter coats, if only for a few hours…it isn’t spring…not even close…but the earth stirs, gently moving, tilting, turning toward the next hour, day, month, until one day it is. The prairie, keeping kith with me, reminding me that even the longest winter ends eventually.
So, I am going to leave you with the final lyrics of the song some of my favorite people sang at my wedding, one of the best days of my life…
When the night has been too lonely
And the road has been too long
And you think that love is only
For the lucky and the strong
Just remember in the winter
Far beneath the bitter snow
Lies the seed that with the sun’s love
In the spring becomes the rose
“The Rose”
