IT’S ALWAYS THIS time of year—when the snowstorms have begun to bleed into each other and the air, just teething in December, now has real bite—that my pale Irish skin loses its ivory sheen and becomes actually translucent, and you can see my major organs quivering like koi fish under a layer of ice.
It was a week of slow, steady accumulation.
On Saturday, we had snowflakes the size of movie tickets. On Wednesday, they flew in our eyes like flicked ash. By Friday, every window in New England was like the frame of an Andrew Wyeth winter landscape.
Andrew Wyeth loved this time of year. The painter, who died five years ago this week, spent most of his life on long walks with his paper and sable brushes, trying to find the right snowbank to sit on.
“God, I’ve frozen my ass off painting snow scenes!” he once supposedly said.
It’s one thing to be a plein-air artist in the south of France, but anyone who shoveled their driveway this week has to respect a man who painted mittenless in this weather for decades.
For Wyeth, exposure to the elements was essential to his art. It got him out of his head. “When I’m alone in the woods, across these fields, I forget all about myself, I don’t exist,” he said. “I’d just as soon walk around with no clothes on.”
I used to think Wyeth chose his favorite subject—isolated barn in a sea of snow—mostly to save paint. Some of his finished watercolors are more than seventy percent untouched paper.
But the more I look at his wintry landscapes, the more they seem to take on an otherworldly glow. For Wyeth, the white space of winter was not a shortcut. It was a mystery.
“I prefer winter and fall, when you can feel the bone structure in the landscape—the loneliness of it,” the painter said. “Something waits beneath it—the whole story doesn’t show.”
This is especially true for “Snow Birds,” a Wyeth watercolor recently slated to be auctioned at Christie’s for $500,000.
Shortly before being sold, it was discovered to be a fake. (You can always expect a flurry of forgeries in the wake of an artist’s death.)
There are small details that give it away.
For example, Wyeth painted pine trees by laying down an undercoat of green, then trickling black branches over it—not the reverse, as seen in the fraud.
Also, the forger was too stiff in his brushwork. The shadows are labored; the hillside is stilted; even the signature is too neat. Wyeth, who painted with fingers that ached to be back in his warm pockets, was all speed and dash with his brushes.
No, this winter landscape was not painted by Andrew Wyeth. It was not painted by someone whose hands were cold.
I SPENT THE past two weeks flat on my back—the result of a slipped disc—and, consequently, my contact with the weather has been limited, though I did crawl from room to room each afternoon to lie in puddles of surprisingly warm sunlight like a cat, all the while staring at the ceiling and working fitfully on my living will, which a combination of boredom and the sudden simulacrum of old age spurred me to tackle.
It wasn’t so bad.
Eventually the random swirls on the ceiling assembled into compelling shapes, and of course there’s a quiet joy in planning one’s funeral.
Only last Monday, when I hobbled to the doctor’s office like the Elephant Man, did I directly experience the weather. At three o’clock the sun was already low, impaled on some branches. The sky was a filthy blue, and it was freezing out. My bare knuckles felt as if they were in a vice, though I barely noticed due to the summer lightning of nerve pain in my left leg. Funny how separate pains in the body vie for conscious attention like claimants to a medieval throne.
“Why is this happening?” I asked the nurse practitioner.
“Well,” she said, “your lumbar vertebrae have become compressed and—”
“No, I mean why is this happening to me?”
It’s the existential question that all New Englanders ask themselves in late January. We stand at (or lie beneath) a sunny window, attempting to bask in secondhand warmth, and ask ourselves the question: why is winter happening to me?
Why do I live here?
Voluntarily?
What complex web of self-sabotaging life decisions led me to take up residence at 42° North, a latitude which, if the Northern Hemisphere had a spine, would correspond roughly to the first lumbar vertebrae, the kidney-shaped bone giving me such trouble?
Come to think of it, why is there a winter at all?
Why does the Earth even teeter on its axis?
Why can’t it always be summer?
But these are childish questions. It’s no use arguing with the weather or trying to wish it away. Like a funeral, life goes on. Rain or shine.
THIS WEEK I planned to write about prognostication, a theme suggested (no surprise here) by the punctual reemergence of Punxsutawney Phil, the celebrity rodent who’s been predicting the weather since 1887, though of course it’s not the original Punxsutawney—given the average lifespan of a captive groundhog, Phil has had more incarnations than the Dalai Lama. Then I was going to address the lead-up to Wednesday’s early morning snow bestowal, when dozens of Massachusetts superintendents (a notoriously skeptical order) canceled school before a single flake had fallen. Then I was going to mention the chilling prophecy of my physical therapist (“Snow means shoveling, and shoveling means more business for us”). And then I thought I would discuss the animal tracks I saw Tuesday night (a groundhog’s?) with particular reference to the Dogon medicine men of Mali who divined the future in paw prints left by the desert fox in the sand at night. Finally, I was going to conclude with my own Wednesday morning walk through the superintendent-vindicating snow and how I turned at one point and looked back at the receding trail of my boot prints and wondered what they foretold.
But I don’t want to write about all that. It seems too predictable somehow. Too predetermined.
What I really want to write about are these icicles hanging outside my window—the glittering daggers that would make the perfect murder weapon, if you think about it.
Yet now I have a new problem. Any attempt to describe an icicle sweating in afternoon sun is haunted and taunted by Vladimir Nabokov, who did it better, who did it best:
“I had stopped to watch a family of brilliant icicles drip-dripping from the eaves.… I did not chance to be watching the right icicle when the right drop fell. There was a rhythm, an alternation in the dripping that I found as teasing as a coin trick.”
