"But why the winter holds me and how I make it through – those are questions I never before tried to answer except in the pages of a daily journal I kept during the winter of 1994-5. This daybook takes stock of things in and around the nineteenth-century brick home in and around the nineteenth-century brick home in Iowa City .... savoring the vegetables, herbs, and fruit that grow on our three-quarter-acre lot..." – Carl H. Klaus, from Weathering Winter







June 21


It's more than a little possible that no one from the midwest needs another journal claim on the weather, not really. The wonderfully hidden tone in Weathering Winter, from Klaus's daybook, is that, let's face it, it's not necessarily the season of winter (or often other seasons for that matter), that we really hang onto in this climate, but instead it's the other stuff that comes around it, after it, on top of it, or, as I'd like to write about, the very necessary imagination to often escape it. If you pay too close attention to the long and thawing days of spring in Wisconsin, for example, you're bound to get yourself in some trouble, unless you are the rare ice fisherman who knows that these long bleak days, although gray and dreary, do allow for some last days of sitting on that floor of ice before it melts and the fish might very well see you coming that much better. I'd like to create a journal of days that talk about those moments that are other than the ones right here before our eyes. It was, after all, only a few weeks back that the it was so hot and humid here in Wisconsin that for all of those of us who had spent the previous months literally salivating over the coming gardening season, had to hide inside or take our weeding in small doses, unbearable heat getting the very best of us.  These past few days, only a week or two away from balm, are cooler – thank you so much – but lo and behold we are now in some kind of upper midwest flood season. We all know the grind of this: our lawns and gardens are untouchable, but the weeds don't pay attention to our anguish. In fact I'm quite certain that there are now few remaining cracks in the cobbled path along the side of the house here that has not sprouted up in any number of a variety of weed species. So green, so lush! But all needs to be plucked...some where down the road. A certain mild anger stirs up as I walk along the sides of my yard and I envision the day coming when I get my chance at all those miniature trees that are trying to sprout in those cracks. In a way, oddly, I can't wait to tackle my yard, rid it all of the thorny leaves, and then it dawns on me that it had been only a month ago that I had felt a mild anger against the slow pace of the coming of the planted yard! I began to wonder, does this seem like a positive cycle of thinking?

I found myself referring back in my mind to an entirely different world than all of this – our trip to Vail, Colorado, five days of sunshine, green colors, lively creeks, bike trails and the Betty Ford Botanical Garden being walked by a hundred people all sporting casual warming clothes and sunglasses. I believe my old reading friend Peter Maybe, author of so many memoirs and fiction of life in souther France, had many such moments as he had been, in his previous life, living either in London or New York, and also bewildered by the sheer amount of time and energy that he was spending on desiring to be anywhere except precisely where he was at. There are a few things we know: London can be a dreary and foggy affair (why wouldn't it, an island, surrounded by water, perched on the northern Atlantic), and New York, bless it for its mechanical intensity, is ultimately a gritty and jangly city that is rarely going to get any four star reviews for its weather either. The answer for Mayle was a swatch of sunshine along the Luberon and, despite the growing pains there, what a difference it made. Sunshine clear and blue air. Smells, no doubt, of the vineage; occasional rain, yes; the Mistral, for certain. However, like Vail, and other cities that brag the 320 days of sunshine a year statistic (maybe the most critical known to mankind), most all things become worthwhile to bear when bathed by the pleasant companion of the soft touch of sunshine and an agreeable climate. My daybook then is a homage to the fair weather fan in me of fair weather. If it is here, in Madison Wisconsin, and allowing me to move about my business, I will most certainly celebrate it; if it doesn't which is seemingly far more often, than I will take a sun needs elsewhere, onto travel of the past or onto travel of the mind. Mine then will have to begin with days in Vail, when the hours were pretty and long, the bike trails ready, the raft rides outrageous, the pine needles along the floor of Booth Falls muskily earthy.