Some mornings it is so cold that any exposed skin hurts when I go out to walk with my border collies; a slight breeze makes it that much worse. I have to hunker down, cover up, keep moving, to stay warm.

And much of nature is hunkering down to get through this season. Next years tree leaves are under hard bud scales to protect from the wind and cold. The foxes have a thick underfur to see them through til spring. The geese and ducks have added more feathers to insulate them from these frigid mornings.

The winter walker is rewarded for having the grits to venture out. The rewards come in the unique sight and sounds of winter days. One has to just slow up and watch and listen. Blue tree shadows from the bright southern sun reach across the snowfields. On cold mornings the still air magnifies any sounds; a magpie walking though dried grass, a kingfisher calling from a river tree, a fox screaming over on the ridge. Ice on the lake groans as it shrinks and expands with the changing weather. When the faint pink and red clouds of morning sunrises add their color to the snow and ice I find that I am standing in a world of pastel heavenly light.

By walking in winter nature you understand the coping and endurance that the foxes and birds and tree must have to survive. And because you have been out and seen the cold and scarcity of winter nature, you will more strongly feel the warmth and bounty of the coming spring.

Here under the naked branches of the tall cottonwoods, in a few months there will be spring mustands and succulent green grass and round headed baby foxes tumbling and fighting with their siblings. As I walk home their curious nature will at times surpass their wariness, and they will hesitate at the entrance to the den, and sniff the air with their little fox nose and watch me pass with their large baby eyes.

I walk over the frozen surface of the frog pound now. In a short time I will hear spring peeper frogs announce in unison that spring is here. They will serenade me all the way home, and I will hear them from my front porch, a quarter mile away.

Life is change and life is repeating cycles. By getting out in winter you will feel intimately the change of the seasons and understand that the return to spring is not on a set calendar date, but is a gradual transition, in small day to day increments. A few grass blades will appear out of last seasons dried straw and brown colored tuft. Some mergansers will stop by the lake on their return north to their summer range. The ice will slowly recede off of the lake, until on a warm chinook morning I find the wind has broken it all free.

1/22/97