Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

Survival

May deplores Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper, in which the former works all summer gathering supplies for winter, while the latter merely sings. Then, in wintertime, the ant is smug about its stores of plenty while it taunts the grasshopper for its idleness and allows it to starve. May always thought the ant had missed the chance to exchange a portion of its grain for the grasshopper’s summer music. However, as an adult, May knows that grasshoppers do not winter, only surviving through their eggs. She considers that, over time, the grasshopper has been anthropomorphized as “the universal vagrant,” the specificities of its character changing with the decades (225). In contrast, the ants are reliable, hardworking citizens who look after their own. May does not think that the ant and grasshopper metaphors can be so clear cut when it comes to humanity, as individuals all experience ant and grasshopper years—years of saving up reserves and ones when we fall through the net.

May’s writing studio is close to a beehive. Bees are eusocial insects which function as a single organism, rather than as individuals. May tests how far the metaphor of a bee colony can be applied to humanity and decides that it works as far as cells of a human body go. Like the individual bees in a colony which all have their roles, the cells in a body regulate themselves. While bees may seem like summer insects, the bulk of their work is geared towards surviving winter. The bee colonies attempt to save as many lives as they can, as they commit themselves to honey production as soon as springtime flowers appear. Bees keep the hive warm in winter by disconnecting their wings from their flight muscles and revving them up to create heat. Their body temperature can sometimes reach 45 degrees Centigrade or 113 degrees Fahrenheit.

However, the analogy of the beehive to humanity falls short because we do not have fixed, utilitarian roles. Instead, our lives are complex, filled with alternate seasons of triumph and despondency. After being in a negative phase or wintering, we can come back with more to contribute.

While Aesop’s ant was industrious all summer, May considers that winter is the time when we can truly engage in projects of making and repair. These can range from home improvements, crafts, or even studying in detail the concepts that a person was too distracted to master in summer. Drawing a distinction between her winter and summer reading, May states that while in summer “I want big, splashy ideas and trashy novels,” in winter “I want concepts to chew over in a pool of lamplight; slow, spiritual reading; a re-enforcement of the soul” (238).

In referencing Sylvia Plath’s poem “Wintering,” a work that shows how bees try to survive the cold and includes the quote “winter is for women,” May muses that winter might be a special time for women’s traditional crafts to take root (239). May dreams of having her own beehive one day, in order to feel a connection to life during the coldest months.

Song

Robins are birds that are known for their tameness and their unique ability to be present in winter. Unlike most other birds, they do not migrate, and their bright orange breast feathers make them more visible than their plainer peers. Robins who have sufficient winter fat will begin to sing as soon as the winter solstice is over and the days become longer. From an evolutionary perspective, winter singing enables the male robin to advertise his good health to the female robins it hopes to mate with in springtime. While this is potentially costly to the little creature, May considers that “he is also practicing for happier times” (245).

In the first 18 months of motherhood, May lost her voice, which had been a powerful part of her identity. For May, who sang in choirs and with loved ones, singing had been a tool of empowerment. This formerly reliable instrument became crackling, fading in and out. Medical tests could not spot the cause of this deficiency. With her faltering voice, May felt like a “walking metaphor” as becoming a mother was like “becoming invisible”—less like an individual and more like a creature with a baggy, post-childbirth body who is judged for her every choice (246). Her lost voice thus accompanies her sense of her own irrelevance post-childbirth.

A friend suggests the assistance of a singing teacher to help May reclaim her voice. Under the tutelage of a man named Philip, May learns to re-engage the muscles at the back of her throat and experiences a state of flow and relaxation. May concurrently analyzes how she uses her voice and finds that she is constantly straining it in the service of others. This occurs especially in her work as a creative writing tutor, where her job is to inspire students and sacrifice her energy for their sake. When she reads Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, May has the potent realization that she has been using her voice to conquer her environment rather than merge with it harmoniously. She and Philip practice speaking in an unrushed manner that contrasts with the frantic pace May formerly adopted because she feared being interrupted.

Even prior to this particular wintering, May recalls the class-based adaptations she had to make to her voice at different stages of childhood. To accommodate and fit in with others, she has alternated between estuary English—the accent of people who live around the Thames estuary—where the consonant ‘t’ is frequently dropped, and the rounder tones of the pronunciation that is common in middle-class and academic environments. May further considers that women’s voices, more than men’s, are often challenged and winnowed into congeniality. This is because when a woman speaks she has authority and must fine-tune the sound of that power in a manner that does not threaten men. May has found herself softening the more strident cadences in her voice and adding inflections of mock-hesitation to seem less intimidating. The voice lessons enable May to reclaim the pleasure she found in her voice. She also returns to the practice of singing, feeling that she has different connections to the people singing with her. When May sings with her son, she feels that she is teaching him a mode of survival. May writes that, like robins, people must also sing to display their hope for better times.