From my bed it is a perfect Montana scene.

My pillows are propped behind me and knees drawn up so this laptop is at the right angle to type away. And to my left, out a window still streaked with dog slobber, is my husband’s camper, tarped up in blue and frosted with last night’s snowfall. Beyond this are roofs with chimneys blowing out tufts of smoke, and then hills with trees heavy and dripping under drifts.

I’m well into my fourth winter in Montana. I forget how this turns my life into a series of activities done in slow motion. Everything – from walking to the car, to driving to work, to clothing myself every time I leave my house – is like I am moving under water. I feel like the trees outside the window, sagging under their weight. Everything takes twice is long and the window of daylight seems like little more than a sliver before the curtains fall back and it is dark again.

In other years, I’ve raged against the dying of the light.

This year, I’m aligned with this season arriving.

Our worlds are smaller. Travel on some days is ill-advised or impossible. Taking the dog out for a walk in snow boots, gloves, beanie, and sometimes snow pants is a long labor each time and each time we return, even from a walk around town, we blast through the front door, white flakes swirling around and off us, exposed hair frozen stiff, like we’ve just returned from an expedition to Antarctica. We put the kettle on, turn on the heater and it crackles to life and then we collapse on the couch.

When I first moved into this 1880s house, I put up a map of the world and blown up pictures of places that I have loved. They remind me of wilder, rockier times as I lie there on the couch, as the heater roars, still half in my snowy day clothes and I look up and around me. There’s a photo of a fire on a beach; a full moon over a lonely lagoon; a wall of tiles in Lisbon; a wave crashing on a Cornwall shore. But right now, stepping into this weather-beaten home with a sagging deck backed by a camper covered by a blue tarp flapping in the wind, this beats out all those places for me. Like that beach at night, lit up by a driftwood fire, or that neighborhood in Portugal that I wandered around in seven years ago, or that full moon I saw on a night run near a lagoon on the edge of rainforest, this is where I am meant to be.

Outside in our yard, the hammock has been folded up and the trees that shone green in June are a skeletal outline in the porch light as evening comes.
Maybe that isn’t a shot for a calendar. But it’s winter and it’s home and I’m grateful that it’s closing in around me.