Winter Blankets Quotes

It's come at last," she thought, "the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn't enough food in the house you pretended that you weren't hungry so they could have more. In the cold of a winter's night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn't be cold. You'd kill anyone who tried to harm them - I tried my best to kill that man in the hallway. Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you'd give your life to spare them from.

There is dew on these poems in the morning, and at night a cool breeze may rise from them. In the winter they are blankets, in the summer a place to swim. I like talking to you like this. Have you moved a step closer? Soon we may be kissing.

In November, the earth is growing quiet. It is making its bed, a winter bed for flowers and small creatures. The bed is white and silent, and much life can hide beneath its blankets.

The sensation reminds him of the first snow of winter, for those first few hours when everything is blanketed in white, soft and quiet.

Perhaps because it seems so appropriate, I don't notice the rain. It falls in sheets, a blanket of silvery thread rushing to the hard almost-winter ground. Still, I stand without moving at the side of the coffin.

I slept in your ashes last night. It was like you laid your shadow down before you left. It smelled like hearth smoke and winter air. I made a blanket of the empty space. I pressed my cheek against the place where yours had been.

Trust is not a gasoline-soaked blanket that succumbs to the matches of betrayal, never able to be used for its warmth again; it’s a tapestry that wears thin in places, but can be patched over if you have the right materials, circumstances, and patience to repair it. If you don’t, you’re always the one who feels the coldest when winter comes.

We experience a discomfort that may be foreign to others, but that pain opens up a world of beauty. Wouldn't you think?

I’m alone. When I’m comatose from writing and mothering, when I’m hurting too badly to cook, talk, or smile, I curl up with ‘alone’ like a security blanket. Alone doesn’t care that I don’t shave my legs in the winter. Alone never gets disappointed by me.” Eva sighed. “It’s the best relationship I’ve ever been in.

Deep winter and the night air is cold. So still, it feels like the world goes on forever in the darkness until you look up and the earth stops in a ceiling of stars. My head against my grandfather's arm, a blanket around us as we sit on the front porch swing. Its whine like a song. You don't need words on a night like this. Just the warmth of your grandfather's arm. Just the silent promise that the world as we know it will always be here.

Wesley went everywhere with me from then on. I even wrapped him in baby blankets and held him in my arms while grocery shopping, to keep him warm during the first cold winter. Occasionally someone would ask to see "the baby," and when I opened the blanket, would leap back shrieking, "What is that?! A dinosaur?" Apparently, the world is full of educated adults with mortgages and stock portfolios who think people are walking around grocery stores with dinosaurs in their arms.

The dark and cold of winter pressed its snowy blanket down. It stilled the land and bid it rest, to dream beneath its frosty gown.

Reclaimed by the small-time day-to-day, pretending life is Back To Normal, wrapping herself shivering against contingency's winter in some threadbare blanket of first-quarter expenses, school committees, cable-bill irregularities, a workday jittering with low-life fantasies for which "fraud" is often too elegant a term, upstairs neighbors to whom bathtub caulking is an alien concept, symptoms upper-respiratory and lower-intestinal, all in the quaint belief that change will always be gradual enough to manage, with insurance, with safety equipment, with healthy diets and regular exercise, and that evil never comes roaring out of the sky to explode into anybody's towering delusions about being exempt. . .

I'll be your blanket, baby. Wrap yourself up in me. Let me give you shelter, in the winter of this world.

I miss the snow. I miss looking at it, walking in it, tasting it. I used to love those days when it was so cold everyone else would be tucked away inside trying to stay warm. I would be the only one out walking, so I could look across the fields and see miles of snow without a single footprint in it. It would be completely silent -- no cars, no birds singing, no doors slamming. Just silence and snow. God, I miss snow. The stars, the moon, the wind, and blankets of pure, pristine snow.

Rain in the winter smelled simply like ice, the cold air burning the tips of ears, cheeks, and eyelashes. Winter rain was for hiding in quilts and blankets, for tying woolen scarves around noses and mouths–the moisture of rasping breaths stinging chapped lips.

As he looked out and saw the grey landscape through the gently falling snow, he could not help thinking how much better it would be if people could go to sleep like the fields; could be blanketed down under the snow, to wake with their hurts healed and their defeats forgotten.

Katie heard the story. 'It's come at last,' she thought, 'the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn't enough food in the house you pretended you weren't hungry so they could have more. In the cold of a winter's night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn't be cold. You'd kill anyone who tried to harm them...Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you'd give your life to spare them.

Grief was not a state of mind, but a physical thing, a void, a deadening blanket of unbearable pain, precluding all solace.

We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models: furnishings, decorative elements, blankets, record player have all been chosen among a certain number of given possibilities. What can they reveal to you about what she is really like?

During those times, only under piles of blankets did she feel substantial enough not to drift away; they kept her weighted down and a part of the world. But eventually her dog's persistence and her own strong will would win over, and she'd drag herself up from the thick bog and go back to her chores and her books, carving the missing days into the wall so they did not escape entirely.

He longed for it to be winter. A cold wind would blow, the sea would pound, and he would rise cheerful and fit from a delicious sleep beneath warm blankets. Then would come days in which he would write his great novel. The kettle would boil and hot coffee would froth in his cup. In the garden the citron would flower beneath a brilliant moon, its branches dripping fragrance. The starry sky would sweeten the soft silence and Hemdat would pour the dew of his soul into the sea-blue night.

Months passed, winter easing gently into place, as southern winters do. The sun, warm as a blanket, wrapped Kya's shoulders, coaxing her deeper into the marsh. Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn't know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land that caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.

Where did you wash? the boy thought. The village water supply was two streets down the road. I must have water here for him, the boy thought, and soap and a good towel. Why am I so thoughtless? I must get him another shirt and a jacket for the winter and some sort of shoes and another blanket.

Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the colour of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which - though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off - the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations... so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects...

Tell the trafic jams to no open their roads to you. Tell the eyes that meet you on the road, that I’m no longer jealous. Tell the souls that share with you the details of your day, that I no longer wich to be them. Tell to the one I advised to take care of you, to forget my advice, and to neglect you as she wants. Tell your pillow to not be gentle with your head. Tell your tooth brush to not be gentle with your gums. Tell your hair brush to not care about your head skin. Tell your blanket to not give you warmth. Tell your winter clothes to not protect you from the cold. Tell the streets’ dogs to frighten you. Tell your car’s other seat that I no longer dream of sitting on it. Tell your country that I no longer dream of flying to it. Tell your friends, your coworkers, your best friend, your neighbours, the world, the universe, your ground, your sky, I broke your chains, and I no longer care about you. So leave on the story’s seat a dry flower, and leave my memory.

Why did people shrink away from winter, he wondered, safe in their blankets, hiding by their fires? If they knew how beautiful winter really was, they would walk out naked into the snow, walk and walk, until their frozen hearts split open with joy.

mountains. They stand at every view, like a mother offering a blanket in which to wrap everyday life and shelter it from useless. dreads. In june they are walls of white rhodendron blossom. In autumn the forests set themselves afflame with color. Even winter has its icy charms.

Colder than the winter wind howling its dirge through the Southwest Forest. Colder than the snow blanketing tree, rock and earth in its silent shroud. Colder than ice that lay on water and hung in shards from branches and bushes. Colder than these was the smile of Ferahgo the Assassin!

No one could imagine how a man could survive one winter alone and exposed in the woods, never mind decades of them. Howard, instead of trying to explain the hermit's existence in terms of hearth fires and trappers' shacks, preferred the blank space the old man actually seemed to inhabit; he liked to think of some fold in the woods, some seam that only the hermit could sense and slip into, where the frozen forest itself would accept him and he would no longer need fire or wool blankets, but instead flourish wreathed in snow, spun in frost, with limbs like cold wood and blood like frigid sap.

A wolf wasn’t cruel when she killed for her meal. A nighthawk wasn’t cruel when he ripped his talons through the still-warm body of a mouse. Winter wasn’t cruel when it blanketed the land in snow and stole the warmth from your bones. Sunder and Bane might be cold, but they weren’t cruel. They were merely as nature made them.

The first time Ree kissed a man it was not a man, but Gail acting as a man, and as the kissing progressed and Gail acting as a man pushed her backwards onto a blanket of pine needles in shade and slipped her tongue deep into Ree's mouth, Ree found herself sucking on the wiggling tongue of a man in her mind, sucking that plunging tongue of the man in her mind until she tasted morning coffee and cigars and spit leaked from between her lips and down her chin. She opened her eyes then and smiled, and Gail yet acting the man roughed up her breasts with grabs and pinches, kissed her neck, murmuring and Ree said, "Just like that! I want it to be just like that!" There came three seasons of giggling and practice, puckering readily anytime they were alone, each being the man and the woman, each on top and bottom, pushing for it with grunts or receiving it with signs. The first time Ree kissed a boy who was not a girl his lips were soft and timid on hers, dry and unmoving, until finally she had to say it and did, "Tongue, honey, tongue," and the boy she called honey turned away saying, "Yuck!

...she’d found she couldn’t bring herself to kill any of her bees, which was the system all the northern demesnes used, and so had to get them through the winter somehow. She’d been cold that winter herself, after wrapping up her most exposed hives in all the blankets she had.

It wasn’t beautiful. A Winter wedding is a union of elation and depression, red velvet blankets in a cheap motel room stained with semen from sex devoid of meaning, and black mold clinging to the fringe of floral shower curtains like a heap of dead forevers. You sat down at the foot of the bed, looking at me like I had already
driven away. I was thinking about watching CNN. How fucked up is that? I wanted to know that your second hand, off-white dress, and my black polyester bow tie wasn’t as tragic as a hurricane devouring a suburb, or a train derailment in no where, Virginia, ending the lives of two young college hopefuls. I was naïve. I thought that there were as many right ways to feel love as the amount of
 pubic hair, 
 belly lint, and 
scratch marks abandoned by lovers in our honeymoon suite. When you looked at me in bed that night, I put my hand on your chest to feel a little more human. I don’t know what to call you; a name does not describe the aches, or lack of. This love is unusual and comfortable. If you were to leave, I know I’d search for days, in newspapers and broadcasts, in car accidents and exposés on genocide in Kosovo. (How do I address this? How is one to feel about a love without a name?) My heart would be ambivalent, too scared to look for you behind the curtains of the motel window, outside in the abyss of powder and pay phones because I don’t know how to love you. -Kosovo

She remembered the way it looked at sunset, with the island winged cats perched on the rooftops, and the way it smelled at dawn of fresh-baked bread. In spring, wildflowers sprouted everywhere-the roofs, the cliffs, the fields. In winter, snow blanketed everything in thick white fluff.

I stood at the end of the street, catching snow in my mouth, and laughed softly to myself as I realized that without my insomnia and anxiety and pain I’d never have been awake to see the city that never sleeps asleep and blanketed up for winter. I smiled and felt silly, but in the best possible way.

In January in Northern Russia, everything vanishes beneath a deep blanket of whiteness. Rivers, fields, trees, roads, and houses disappear, and the landscape becomes a white sea of mounds and hollows. On days when the sky is gray, it is hard to see where earth merges with air. On brilliant days when the sky is a rich blue, the sunlight is blinding, as if millions of diamonds were scattered on the snow, refracting light. In Catherine's time, the log roads of summer were covered with a smooth coating of snow and ice that enabled the sledges to glide smoothly at startling speeds; on some days, her procession covered a hundred miles.

I’m just really happy,” he says, rolling away from me and leaning up on his elbow. “I’m so happy it makes me want to hide, because I don’t know what to do with it all. I want to store it up and save it for winter.” “But winter just ended.” “Fine, I want to store it up and save it for when I don’t feel like it’s bursting from every single one of my pores. I didn’t know this was possible. To feel this way.” I lean up on my elbow to face him, smiling. “What? Are you going to make fun of me?” Gideon asks. Someone shushes us from a nearby blanket, so I pitch my voice low and whisper in his ear. “I can’t make fun of you because I feel the exact same way.” We

It was freezing, but the cold effortlessly numbed my feet and aching hands. I walked quietly, barefoot, to the end of the block, leaving my shoes behind to remind me how to find my way home. I stood at the end of the street, catching snow in my mouth, and laughed softly to myself as I realized that without my insomnia and anxiety and pain I’d never have been awake to see the city that never sleeps asleep and blanketed up for winter. I smiled and felt silly, but in the best possible way. As I turned and looked back toward the hotel I noticed that my footprints leading out into the city were mismatched. One side was glistening, small and white. The other was misshapen from my limp and each heel was pooled with spots of bright red blood. It struck me as a metaphor for my life. One side light and magical. Always seeing the good. Lucky. The other side bloodied, stumbling. Never quite able to keep up. It was like the Jesus-beach-footprint-in-the-sand poem, except with less Jesus and more bleeding. It was my life, there in white and red. And I was grateful for it. “Um, miss?” It was the man from the front desk leaning tentatively out of the front door with a concerned look on his face. “Coming,” I said. I felt a bit foolish and considered trying to clarify but then thought better of it. There was no way to explain to this stranger how my mental illness had just gifted me with a magical moment. I realized it would have sounded a bit crazy, but that made sense. After all, I was a bit crazy. And I didn’t even have to pretend to be good at it. I was a damn natural.

It's that magnificent interlude in New York between winter and spring, when you feel the warmth stirring, and you remember that the dreadful naked trees will inevitably sprout tiny green buds, soon. Everyone rushes into the parks, the streets--and you even forget that, very soon , summer will come scorchingly, dropping from the sky like a blanket of steam...

Seasons Haiku Summer sleeps cozy spooning Spring. Winter needs a blanket of snow.

I’m the kind of guy who turns my fan on in winter, only to then go and add another blanket on top of my bed. I practice inefficiency even while I sleep, so I’ll be prepared to one day be a politician.

Sun is bright sky is clear, ocean calling you to swimm enjoy don't forget winter will come where you'll respect water and being friends of blankets, life is like that enjoy the moment remember the feature.

A blanket could be used to keep an iceberg warm. People are so selfish and want to stop global warming. Well, if you were a snowman, and were cold all the time, wouldn’t you welcome a little summer into your winter?


Last night I dreamed of the "happy hunting ground." I passed through a place of bones that looked human, but weren't--the skulls were wrong. Then I came to a place where the days were the best of every season, the sweetest air and water in spring, then the dry heat where deer make dust in the road, the fog of fall with good leaves. And you could shoot without a gun, never kill, but the rabbits would do a little dance, all as if it were a game, and they were playing it too. Then winter came with heavy powder-snow, and big deer, horses, goats and buffaloes--all white--snorted, tossed their heads, and I lay down with my Army blanket, made my bed in the snow, then dreamed within the dream. I dreamed I was at Fleety's, and she told me the bones were poor people killed by bandits, and she took me back to the place, and under a huge rock where no light should have shown, a cave almost, was a dogwood tree. It glowed the kind of red those trees get at sundown, the buds were purple in that weird light, and a madman came out with an axe and chopped at the skulls, trying to make them human-looking. Then I went back to the other side of both dreams. --from a letter to his mother, Helen Pancake, where he describes a dream that seems to encapsulate the play between violence and gentleness in his life.

I Give You Back' I release you, my beautiful and terrible fear. I release you. You were my beloved and hated twin, but now, I don't know you as myself. I release you with all the pain I would know at the death of my daughters. You are not my blood anymore. I give you back the white soldiers who burned down my home, beheaded my children, raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters. I give you back to those who stole the food from our plates when we were starving. I release you, fear, because you hold these scenes in front of me and I was born with eyes that can never close. I release you, fear, so you can no longer keep me naked and frozen in the winter, or smothered under blankets in the summer. I release you I release you I release you I release you I am not afraid to be angry. I am not afraid to rejoice. I am not afraid to be black. I am not afraid to be white. I am not afraid to be hungry. I am not afraid to be full. I am not afraid to be hated. I am not afraid to be loved, to be loved, to be loved, fear. Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash. You have gutted me, but I gave you the knife. You have devoured me, but I lay myself across the fire. You held y mother down and raped her, but I gave you the heated thing. I take myself back, fear. You are not my shadow any longer. I won't hold you in my hands. You can't live in my eyes, my ears, my voice, my belly, or in my heart my heart my heart my heart But come here, fear I am alive and you are so afraid of dying.

I am, for certain, a powerful force. I've stood outside on a winter day, for years an unending winter, without batting an eye. While you... even when you go out on a sunny day, you bring a sweater just in case. You can never be on the outskirts, you can never be in the cold, you can never be at the losing end. You need your blankets. You make me think twice about what it means to be a protector; you protected me so well only because I was beside you. It wasn't about me. It was still about you. But I have learned... that even in the winter the summer lasts within me. Flowers grow and sunbeams exit the palms of my hands. And that I can grow feathers and lots of fur.

A heavy snow fell outside. In a symbolic kind of way, snow was to Chicago what cotton was to Mississippi. It blanketed the land. It was inevitable. Both were so much a part of the landscape of either place that where you saw snow you by definition would not see cotton and vice versa. Coming to Chicago was a guarantee that you would not be picking cotton. The people sitting at the dining room table this late winter night had chosen snow over cotton.

I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up.

When I'm comatose from writing and mothering, when I'm hurting too badly to cook, talk or smile, I curl up with 'alone' like a security blanket. Alone doesn't care that I don't shave my legs in the winter. Alone never get disappointed in me.

Who trusts the Bridge Builder when you wake to snow on your blankets and winter blasting through cracked walls and dinner for four is a fifty cent box of Kraft Dinner rationed in half and your dad tells you every single day that he just doesn't know how there is ever going to be enough? How do you count on life when the hopes don't add up? A morning in late November, joy shimmers. The hopes don't have to add up. The blessings do. ...count blessings and discover who can be counted on.

I would blanket myself in whatever numbness I could and accept two things: either I’d survive this, in which case I could nurse my wounds in private and finally give in to building sobs, or he’d kill me and then none of it would matter anyway. Kill

THOSE BORN UNDER Pacific Northwest skies are like daffodils: they can achieve beauty only after a long, cold sulk in the rain. Henry, our mother, and I were Pacific Northwest babies. At the first patter of raindrops on the roof, a comfortable melancholy settled over the house. The three of us spent dark, wet days wrapped in old quilts, sitting and sighing at the watery sky. Viviane, with her acute gift for smell, could close her eyes and know the season just by the smell of the rain. Summer rain smelled like newly clipped grass, like mouths stained red with berry juice — blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. It smelled like late nights spent pointing constellations out from their starry guises, freshly washed laundry drying outside on the line, like barbecues and stolen kisses in a 1932 Ford Coupe. The first of the many autumn rains smelled smoky, like a doused campsite fire, as if the ground itself had been aflame during those hot summer months. It smelled like burnt piles of collected leaves, the cough of a newly revived chimney, roasted chestnuts, the scent of a man’s hands after hours spent in a woodshop. Fall rain was not Viviane’s favorite. Rain in the winter smelled simply like ice, the cold air burning the tips of ears, cheeks, and eyelashes. Winter rain was for hiding in quilts and blankets, for tying woolen scarves around noses and mouths — the moisture of rasping breaths stinging chapped lips. The first bout of warm spring rain caused normally respectable women to pull off their stockings and run through muddy puddles alongside their children. Viviane was convinced it was due to the way the rain smelled: like the earth, tulip bulbs, and dahlia roots. It smelled like the mud along a riverbed, like if she opened her mouth wide enough, she could taste the minerals in the air. Viviane could feel the heat of the rain against her fingers when she pressed her hand to the ground after a storm. But in 1959, the year Henry and I turned fifteen, those warm spring rains never arrived. March came and went without a single drop falling from the sky. The air that month smelled dry and flat. Viviane would wake up in the morning unsure of where she was or what she should be doing. Did the wash need to be hung on the line? Was there firewood to be brought in from the woodshed and stacked on the back porch? Even nature seemed confused. When the rains didn’t appear, the daffodil bulbs dried to dust in their beds of mulch and soil. The trees remained leafless, and the squirrels, without acorns to feed on and with nests to build, ran in confused circles below the bare limbs. The only person who seemed unfazed by the disappearance of the rain was my grandmother. Emilienne was not a Pacific Northwest baby nor a daffodil. Emilienne was more like a petunia. She needed the water but could do without the puddles and wet feet. She didn’t have any desire to ponder the gray skies. She found all the rain to be a bit of an inconvenience, to be honest.

When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe! Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

Winter tightened its grip on Alaska. The vastness of the landscape dwindled down to the confines of their cabin. The sun rose at quarter past ten in the morning and set only fifteen minutes after the end of the school day. Less than six hours of light a day. Snow fell endlessly, blanketed everything. It piled up in drifts and spun its lace across windowpanes, leaving them nothing to see except themselves. In the few daylight hours, the sky stretched gray overhead; some days there was merely the memory of light rather than any real glow. Wind scoured the landscape, cried out as if in pain. The fireweed froze, turned into intricate ice sculptures that stuck up from the snow. In the freezing cold, everything stuck -- car doors froze, windows cracked, engines refused to start. The ham radio filled with warnings of bad weather and listed the deaths that were as common in Alaska in the winter as frozen eyelashes. People died for the smallest mistake -- car keys dropped in a river, a gas tank gone dry, a snow machine breaking down, a turn taken too fast. Leni couldn't go anywhere or do anything without a warning. Already the winter seemed to have gone on forever. Shore ice seized the coastline, glazed the shells and stones until the beach looked like a silver-sequined collar. Wind roared across the homestead, as it had all winter, transforming the white landscape with every breath. Trees cowered in the face of it, animals built dens and burrowed in holes and went into hiding. Not so different from the humans, who hunkered down in this cold, took special care.

It was early autumn, then, before the snow began to fly. –(There’s an expression for you, born in the country, born from the imaginations of men and their feeling for the right word, the only word, to mirror clearly what they see! Those with few words must know how to use them.) Men who have seen it, who have watched it day by day outside their cabin window coming down from the sky, like the visible remorse of an ageing year; who have watched it bead upon the ears of the horses they rode, muffle the sound of hoofs on the trail, lie upon spruce boughs and over grass – cover, as if forever, the landscape in which they moved, round off the mountains, blanket the ice in the rivers – for them the snow flies. The snow doesn’t fall. It may ride the wind. It may descend slowly, in utter quiet, from the grey and laden clouds, so that you can hear the flakes touching lightly on the wide white waste, as they come to rest at the end of their flight. Flight – that’s the word. They beat in the air like wings, as if reluctant ever to touch the ground. I have observed them coming down, on a very cold day, near its end when the sky above me was still blue, in flakes great and wide as the palm of my hand. They were like immense moths winging down in the twilight, making the silence about me visible.

It was so cold. In the monastery. Sometimes the wind came from the sea with ice in it... It could freeze the skin off your face. Once the snow was so deep we couldn't get out of the doors to the woodshed. A monk jumped from a window. He sank into a drift and took a long time to get up. That night, they made me sleep next to the stove. I was small, thin, like a piece of birch bark. But then the Stove went out. Father Bernard took me into his cell... It was he who first gave me chalk and paper. He was so old his eyes his eyes looked as if he was crying. But he was never sad. In winter he had fewer blankets than the others. He said he didn't need them because God warmed him. (...) But even Father Bernard was cold that night. He laid me down on the bed next to him, wrapped me in an animal skin, then in his own arms. He told me stories about Jesus. How His love could wake the dead and how with Him in one's heart one could heat the world... When I woke it was light. The snow had stopped. I was warm. But he was cold. I gave him the skin but his body was stiff. I didn't know what to do. I got out a piece of paper from his chest under the bed and drew him, lying there. His face had a smile on it. I knew that God had been there when he died. That now He was in me, and because of Father Bernard I would be warm forever.

They was some of em wound up just livin in the woods like animals. And that was a cold winter, too. People would see em crossin the road at night in the carlights. Whole families. Carryin blankets. Pots and pans. People tried to find em. Take em some flour and meal. Coffee. Maybe a little sidemeat. I think about those children. I do yet.

And I remember that I’m not lonely. I’m alone. When I’m comatose from writing and mothering, when I’m hurting too badly to cook, talk, or smile, I curl up with ‘alone’ like a security blanket. Alone doesn’t care that I don’t shave my legs in the winter. Alone never gets disappointed by me.” Eva sighed. “It’s the best relationship I’ve ever been in.

We’ve covered ourselves with everything we own, plus a snow blanket on top. It does provide warmth. The snow is everywhere - our pillows, our hair. You stick your head out, take a deal breath, slip under the covers again and breathe out. Feels warm. The snow on your hair melts, then turns to ice. A winter hat. Silence. Darkness... The only thing visible is the snow.

YOU CAN KIND of see them if you get on your tippy toes and look over the fence,” A.J. says. “There, in the distance!” They had left Alice at seven that morning, taken the ferry to Hyannis, then driven two hours to Portsmouth only to discover that the Green Animals Topiary Garden is closed from November through May. A.J. finds that he cannot make eye contact with either his daughter or Lambiase. It is twenty-nine degrees, but shame is keeping him warm. Maya stands on her toes and when that doesn’t work, she tries hopping. “I can’t see anything,” she says. “Here, I’ll get you higher,” Lambiase says, lifting Maya onto his shoulders. “Maybe I can see a little bit,” Maya says doubtfully. “No, I definitely cannot see anything. They’re all covered.” Her lower lip begins to quiver. She looks at A.J. with pained eyes. He doesn’t think he can take any more of this. Suddenly, she smiles brightly at A.J. “But you know what, Daddy? I can imagine what the elephant looks like under the blanket. And the tiger! And the unicorn!” She nods at her father as if to say, Clearly this imaginative exercise must have been your point in taking me here in the middle of winter. “That’s

   Hugo thought that it simply could not be otherwise; he would surely somewhere see that beautiful, beloved face that he had daily seen for so long!    But he did not see it.    After his search had gone on for some months, after winter had already cast its snowflakes and its blanket of ice over the city, he gave up his efforts. He sat in his room and held his lovely, weary head in both his hands.

I realized I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was scared to look outside. Now I had to open them. I looked out the window and saw for the first time how the hospital was out in the country. The moon was low in the sky over the pastureland; the face of it was scarred and scuffed where it had just torn up out of the snarl of scrub oak and madrone trees on the horizon. The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon. It called to mind how I noticed the exact same thing when I was off on a hunt with Papa and the uncles and I lay rolled in blankets Grandma had woven, lying off a piece from where the men hunkered around the fire as they passed a quart jar of cactus liquor in a silent circle. I watched that big Oregon prairie moon above me put all the stars around it to shame. I kept awake watching, to see if the moon ever got dimmer or if the stars got brighter, till the dew commenced to drift onto my cheeks and I had to pull a blanket over my head. Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window — cast a long spider of shadow out across the grass as it ran out of sight behind a hedge. When it ran back to where I could get a better look, I saw it was a dog, a young, gangly mongrel slipped off from home to find out about things went on after dark. He was sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour. He’d run his muzzle down a hole, butt up in the air and tail going, then dash off to another. The moon glistened around him on the wet grass, and when he ran he left tracks like dabs of dark paint spattered across the blue shine of the lawn. Galloping from one particularly interesting hole to the next, he became so took with what was coming off — the moon up there, the night, the breeze full of smells so wild makes a young dog drunk — that he had to lie down on his back and roll. He twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray came off him in the moon like silver scales. He sniffed all the holes over again one quick one, to get the smells down good, then suddenly froze still with one paw lifted and his head tilted, listening. I listened too, but I couldn’t hear anything except the popping of the window shade. I listened for a long time. Then, from a long way off, I heard a high, laughing gabble, faint and coming closer. Canada honkers going south for the winter. I remembered all the hunting and belly-crawling I’d ever done trying to kill a honker, and that I never got one. I tried to look where the dog was looking to see if I could find the flock, but it was too dark. The honking came closer and closer till it seemed like they must be flying right through the dorm, right over my head. Then they crossed the moon — a black, weaving necklace, drawn into a V by that lead goose. For an instant that lead goose was right in the center of that circle, bigger than the others, a black cross opening and closing, then he pulled his V out of sight into the sky once more. I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound.

It’s like when winter comes and it sucks outside and the sun starts going down at 4:30 and you can look at that and get pissed and sad and grumpy. Or you can invite some friends over and make hot chocolate and share blankets and light candles and tell dumb high school stories. Both of those are natural ways to respond to it getting fucking gross outside, both fit really well with winter, but one is great and one sucks.

I started to pull it up. I stopped. He arched an eyebrow at me, like a challenge. “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.” My face grew hot. “Right,” I muttered. “Just… no ideas, okay?” He laughed, but I didn’t think it was at me. “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that. Not really.” I was almost insulted. I was proud of my body. I was strong. I was young. I was capable of providing for my— Fuck. He wiped his eyes. “No, oh god, get that wounded look off your face. Christ.” He took a deep breath. “I’m ace.” I frowned. “What’s that?” “Asexual.” “Oh. Oh.” I scrunched up my face. “Like… really?” Now he was laughing at me. “Like, really.” “How did that work?” I blanched. “Holy shit, ignore me. Seriously, don’t think you need to explain—” “If that’s what you want,” he said, and that was it. I scowled at him. He smiled at me. I lasted a few more seconds. “Are you sure?” “I am,” he said simply. “But.” I waved my hand in the direction of my neck and the scar on it that extended near my shoulder. “And. Like. You know.” He laughed again. I thought I even heard Ox snorting outside the door. “We made it work. It’s not that I’m repulsed by sex or anything. It’s just not everything to me. There’s more to us than physical intimacy. Or there was.” “Oh.” I bit the inside of my cheek, but the words came out in a rush. “And I was okay with that?” “You were,” he said, and his voice took on a wistful tone that made me feel like I was intruding. “We made it work because we… well.” Blue. The room filled with blue. It was smothering. I wanted to go to him. It was like a pull. Toward what, I didn’t know. Instead I pulled off my shirt and let it fall to the floor. “You can stop flexing,” he said, the blue fading slightly. “I’m not.” “Really,” he said. “So your pecs usually bounce up and down like that normally? That’s something you should probably get checked out.” He looked me up and down, but there was no stink of arousal coming from him. Instead, it was warm, like a heavy blanket on a winter day. “You’re bigger than you were. Harder.” “I’m… sorry?” I wasn’t sorry at all. He shook his head. “It looks good on you.

There was some little local controversy too, about a fundraising effort called Suzie's Closet--folks getting together in church basements to make care packages for the plantations--blankets and candy bars.....first they interviewed a local advocate for the homeless, asking why our attention shouuld be down there, "when there's so much suffering right here at home."...it was the usual stuff --all the new stories and just the old stories again.

When I feel lonely, I scroll through Tinder and remind myself what I’m missing. Which is dudes with coconut-oiled beards all posing next to the same graffitied wall in Dumbo with profiles written entirely in emojis. And I remember that I’m not lonely. I’m alone. When I’m comatose from writing and mothering, when I’m hurting too badly to cook, talk, or smile, I curl up with ‘alone’ like a security blanket. Alone doesn’t care that I don’t shave my legs in the winter. Alone never gets disappointed by me.” Eva sighed. “It’s the best relationship I’ve ever been in.” “Are you speaking metaphorically,” asked Cece, “or are you dating a man named Alone?” “You can’t be serious.” “My doorman is a SoundCloud rapper named Sincere. One never knows.” “I like being single,” Eva continued quietly. “I don’t want anyone to have to really see me.” They sat in silence, Eva idly snapping the rubber band on her wrist.

Lies lies lies lies everything is a lie. I wonder if she knew that everything is a lie...because a lie covers life like a blanket in a cold winter day. When you are in need, it helps you. But when it disappears, everything is cold once more. And you suffer, miss the warmth and tend to seek for it over and over again. It is like a drug, actually. You can never have enough but when it doesn't have the same effect anymore, it becomes too much and you die.

ventually Kathryn joined me by the lake with a blanket and picnic basket and entreated me to come away with her into the woods. Through her words and desire I could feel the pull of the divine and hear in her words the echo of the Song of Songs: “Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away with me. The winter is past; the spring has come. Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come. Arise, come, my love, my beautiful one, come with me.

She doesn’t want to sell me and only told you to do so because you didn’t want to care for me while she is gone. Dear Miss Belinda, please keep me! I’ll eat as little as I can. I won’t ask for a new blanket, though this old army one is thin and shabby. I’ll trot for you all winter and try not to show it if I am lame. I’ll do anything a horse can, no matter how humble, in order to earn my living. Don’t, I beg you, send me away among strangers who have neither interest nor pity for me!

Tell the trafic jams to no open their roads to you. Tell the eyes that meet you on the road, that I’m no longer jealous. Tell the souls that share with you the details of your day, that I no longer wish to be them. Tell to the one I advised to take care of you, to forget my advice, and to neglect you as she wants. Tell your pillow to not be gentle with your head. Tell your tooth brush to not be gentle with your gums. Tell your hair brush to not care about your head skin. Tell your blanket to not give you warmth. Tell your winter clothes to not protect you from the cold. Tell the streets’ dogs to frighten you. Tell your car’s other seat that I no longer dream of sitting on it. Tell your country that I no longer dream of flying to it. Tell your friends, your coworkers, your best friend, your neighbours, the world, the universe, your ground, your sky, I broke your chains, and I no longer care about you. So leave on the story’s seat a dry flower, and leave my memory.

Go ahead, Mother,” I finally mutter. “Say what you want to say.” “Don’t you let him cheapen you.” I look back at her, eye her suspiciously, even though she is so frail under the wool blanket. Sorry is the fool who ever underestimates my mother. “If Stuart doesn’t know how intelligent and kind I raised you to be, he can march straight on back to State Street.” She narrows her eyes out at the winter land. “Frankly, I don’t care much for Stuart. He doesn’t know how lucky he was to have you.

When Hamilton, debilitated from illness, rejoined his comrades at Valley Forge in January 1778, he must have shuddered at the mud and log huts and the slovenly state of the men who shivered around the campfires. There was a dearth of gunpowder, tents, uniforms, and blankets. Hideous sights abounded: snow stained with blood from bare, bruised feet; the carcasses of hundreds of decomposing horses; troops gaunt from smallpox, typhus, and scurvy. Washington’s staff was not exempt from the misery and had to bolt down cornmeal mush for breakfast. “For some days past there has been little less than a famine in the camp,” Washington said in mid-February. Before winter’s end, some 2,500 men, almost a quarter of the army, perished from disease, famine, or the cold. 1 To endure such suffering required stoicism reminiscent of the ancient Romans, so Washington had his favorite play, Addison’s Cato, the story of a self-sacrificing Roman statesman, staged at Valley Forge to buck up his weary men. That

Faolan stretched out on the blanket, propping his head on one elbow thoughtfully. “Eire is fine enough, I suppose,” he began, “but if I could have one wish, I’d show ye my Highlands. I’d take ye to the tops of the mountains and show ye where the golden eagles nest. I want ye to see the sun rise and set over the moors. I want to make love to ye in the heather with the warm sun beating down on us.” His eyes widened as an idea occurred to him. “We could sail out to one of the far islands and have it all to ourselves, like Adam and Eve in our very own Eden. I’d take ye walking on the beach in the moonlight, and I wouldna have to share ye with anyone but the selkies.” He gave her hand a gentle squeeze. “I’d teach ye to ride and hunt and fish, mo ruadh, and bank the fires to keep ye warm through the cold winter months.” With a blissful sigh, he pulled her tight against him and buried his face in the crook of her neck. “‘Twould be heaven for sure,” he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice when his lips brushed her ear, “pizza or no.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been a cat guy. Every night as I go to sleep, I have this particular fantasy I indulge in. Most men dream about naked women, but not me. I dream about being isolated in a mountainous forest in the middle of winter, and all I have to stay warm is a single blanket and a cat. In my mind I curl up like a ball with Cap’n tucked in close as we keep each other warm despite the fierce winds raging like a bull around us. Then, after about five minutes of this, we are rescued by a helicopter full of nude models.

Katie heard the story. "It's come at last, she thought, "the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn't enough food in the house you pretended that you weren't hungry so they could have more. In the cold of a winter's night you got up and put your blanket on their bedsos they wouldn't be cold. You'd kill anyone who tried to harm them - I tried my best to kill that man in the hallway. Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you'd give your life to spare them.

Katie heard the story. “It’s come at last,” she thought, “the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn’t enough food in the house you pretended that you weren’t hungry so they could have more. In the cold of a winter’s night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn’t be cold. You’d kill anyone who tried to harm them—I tried my best to kill that man in the hallway. Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you’d give your life to spare them.” Francie

Very Like a Whale One thing that literature would be greatly the better for Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor. Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts, Can'ts seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to go out of their way to say that it is like something else. What foes it mean when we are told That the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold? In the first place, George Gordon Byron had had enough experience To know that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian, it was a lot of Assyrians. However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and thus hinder longevity, We'll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity. Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold, Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a wolf on the fold? In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy there are a great many things, But i don't imagine that among then there is a wolf with purple and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings. No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this Assyrian was actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof; Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof woof? Frankly I think it very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say, at the very most, Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host. But that wasn't fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them, With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers to people they say Oh yes, they're the ones that a lot of wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them. That's the kind of thing that's being done all the time by poets, from Homer to Tennyson; They're always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison, And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket after a winter storm. Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of snow and I'll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical blanket material and we'll see which one keeps warm, And after that maybe you'll begin to comprehend dimly, What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.

At her feet, a luminous path lit the way through the grassy field. It was made entirely from glow sticks; each of the radiant lights had been painstakingly set into the ground at perfect intervals, tracing a curved trail that shone through the darkness. Apparently, Jay had been busy. Near the water’s edge, at the end of the iridescent pathway and beneath a stand of trees, Jay had set up more than just a picnic. He had created a retreat, an oasis for the two of them. Violet shook her head, unable to find the words to speak. He led her closer, and Violet followed, amazed. Jay had hung more of the luminous glow sticks from the low-hanging branches, so they dangled overhead. They drifted and swayed in the breeze that blew up from the lake. Beneath the natural canopy of limbs, he had set up two folding lounge chairs and covered them with pillows and blankets. “I’d planned to use candles, but the wind would’ve blown ‘em out, so I had to improvise.” “Seriously, Jay? This is amazing.” Violet felt awed. She couldn’t imagine how long it must have taken him. “I’m glad you like it.” He led her to one of the chairs and drew her down until she was sitting before he started unpacking the cooler. She half-expected him to pull out a jar of Beluga caviar, some fancy French cheeses, and Dom Perignon champagne. Maybe even a cluster of grapes to feed to her…one at a time. So when he started laying out their picnic, Violet laughed. Instead of expensive fish eggs and stinky cheeses, Jay had packed Daritos and chicken soft tacos-Violet’s favorites. And instead of grapes, he brought Oreos. He knew her way too well. Violet grinned as he pulled out two clear plastic cups and a bottle of sparkling cider. She giggled. “What? No champagne?” He shrugged, pouring a little of the bubbling apple juice into each of the flimsy cups. “I sorta thought that a DUI might ruin the mood.” He lifted his cup and clinked-or rather, tapped-it against hers. “Cheers.” He watched her closely as she took a sip. For several moments, they were silent. The lights swayed above them, creating shadows that danced over them. The park was peaceful, asleep, as the lake’s waters lapped the shore. Across from them, lights from the houses along the water’s edge cast rippling reflections on the shuddering surface. All of these things transformed the ordinary park into a romantic winter rendezvous.

So—there were still four hundred scabs, and it was painful to think of them as scabs because they were just like the others, but they were frightened. They were frightened because they were hungry now, but if they lost their jobs they would be hungrier, and winter was coming. Winter haunted them all because there was only scrub cotton to pick for awhile, maybe a few oranges now and then, maybe not anything. There were colds and flu and pneumonia, and babies being born and unborn, and school, and shoes wearing out. There were old men and women dying, and sometimes the young died before their time. Babies died. Life was just a little thing to them: a shrunken breast, a colorless tent wall in their curious sight, hunger without name and explanation, pain, and the dark. Sometimes in the short winter days, the mothers looked at old magazines and saw ads for milk and pretty blankets and lacy pillows, and insurance for your baby’s education, and sometimes they found articles about how to care for a baby, and they knew why their babies died. They knew anyway. Often they wondered why their babies did not die, how they could survive without all the things necessary to babies in the outside world.

The train company does not have that much to carry, but the rest of us are loaded down like pack animals—we carry the full kit with blanket and ground sheet, steel helmet and heavy winter coat thrown over it. We have a full ammunition pouch on the belt, on our backs the kitbag with the field canteen, and on the other side the folded entrenching tool. A gas mask is slung around our necks, resting on the chest, and the heavy rifle swings back and forth from its strap round the neck. Lastly, a ditty bag is carried in one hand, filled with clean socks, underwear and similar items. The whole lot weighs about 40lb.

When he has disappeared, Mother clears her throat. I don't turn around and look at her in the rocking chair. I don't want her to see the disappointment in my face that he's gone. "Go ahead, Mother," I finally mutter. "Say what you want to say." "Don't you let him cheapen you." I look back at her, eye her suspiciously, even though she is so frail under the wool blanket. Sorry is the fool who ever underestimates my mother. "If Stuart doesn't know how intelligent and kind I raised you to be, he can march straight on back to State Street." She narrows her eyes at the winter land. "Frankly, I don't care much for Stuart. He doesn't know how lucky he was to have you.

Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night’s old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror’s secret by which—though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off—the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations . . . so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning’s banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea?

The king needs riders,” Mother Blackbeak said, still staring at the horizon. “Riders for his wyverns—to be his aerial cavalry. He’s been breeding them in the Gap all these years.” It had been a while—too damn long—but Manon could feel the threads of fate twisting around them, tightening. “And when we are done, when we have served him, he will let us keep the wyverns. To take our host to reclaim the Wastes from the mortal pigs who now dwell there.” A fierce, wild thrill pierced Manon’s chest, sharp as a knife. Following the Matron’s gaze, Manon looked to the horizon, where the mountains were still blanketed with winter. To fly again, to soar through the mountain passes, to hunt down prey the way they’d been born to … They weren’t enchanted ironwood brooms. But wyverns would do just fine.

It was the time of apprehensive mothers, of taciturn fathers, and of burly older brothers, but it was also the time of blankets, of quilts, and of ponchos, and so no one thought it strange that Carla and Gonzalo would spend two or three hours every evening curled up on the sofa beneath a magnificent red pancho made of Chiloe wool that, in the freezing winter of 1991, seemed like a basic necessity. The world is falling to pieces and everything almost always goes to shit and we almost always hurt the people we love or they hurt us irreparably and there doesn’t seem to be a reason to harbor any kind of hope, but at least this story ends well, ends here, with the scene of these two Chilean poets who look each other in the eye and burst out laughing and don’t want to leave the bar for anything, so they order another round of beers.

Only an hour in, and already the first temptation: the warmth of my blankets and bed, my pillows and the fake-fur throw Hannah's mom left here after a weekend visit. They're all saying, Climb in. No one will know if you stay in bed all day. No one will know if you wear the same sweatpants for the entire month, if you eat every meal in front of television shows and use t-shirts as napkins. Go ahead and listen to that same song on repeat until its sound turns to nothing and you sleep the winter away. I only have Mabel's visit to get through, and then all this could be mine. I could scroll through Twitter until my vision blurs and then collapse on my bed like an Oscar Wilde character. I could score myself a bottle of whiskey and let it make me glow, let all the room's edges go soft, let the memories out of their cages. Maybe I would hear him sing again, if all else went quiet.

Winter was come indeed bringing with it those pleasures of which the summer dreamer knows nothing—the delight when the fine and glittering day shows in the window, though one knows how cold it is outside; the delight of getting as close as possible to the blazing range which in the shadowy kitchen throws reflections very different from the pale gleams of sunlight in the yard, the range we cannot take with us on our walk, busy with its own activity, growling and grumbling as it sets to work, for in three hours time luncheon must be ready; the delight of filling one's bowl with steaming café-au-lait—for it is only eight o'clock—and swallowing it in boiling gulps while servants at their tasks come in and out with a, 'Good morning: up early, aren't you?' and a kindly, 'It's snug enough in here, but cold outside,' accompanying the words with that smile which is to be seen only on the faces of those who for the moment are thinking of others and not of themselves, whose expressions, entirely freed from egotism, take on a quality of vacillating goodness, a smile which completes that earlier smile of the bright golden sky touching the window-panes, and crowns our every pleasure as we stand there with the lovely heat of the range at our backs, the hot and limpid flavour of the café-au-lait in our mouths; the delight of night-time when, having had to get up to go shiveringly to the icy lavatory in the tower, into which the air creeps through the ill-fitting window, we later return deliciously to our room, feeling a smile of happiness distend our lips, finding it hard not to jump for sheer joy at the thought of the big bed already warm with our warmth, of the still burning fire, the hot-water bottle, the coverlets and blankets which have imparted their heat to the bed into which we are about to slip, walled in, embattled, hiding ourselves to the chin as against enemies thundering at the gates, who will not (and the thought brings gaiety) get the better of us, since they do not even know where we have so snugly gone to earth, laughing at the wind which is roaring outside, climbing up all the chimneys to every floor of the great house, conducting a search on each landing, trying all the locks: the delight of rolling ourselves in the blankets when we feel its icy breath approaching, sliding a little farther down the bed, gripping the hot-water bottle between our feet, working it up too high, and when we push it down again feeling the place where it has been still hot, pulling up the bedclothes to our faces, rolling ourselves into a ball, turning over, thinking—'How good life is!' too gay even to feel melancholy at the thought of the triviality of all this pleasure.

One pioneer remembered seeing “an open bleak prairie, the cold wind howling overhead…a new-made grave, a woman and three children sitting near by, a girl of 14 summers walking round and round in a circle, wringing her hands and calling upon her dead parent.” Janette Riker was only a young girl when she headed for Oregon with her father and two brothers in 1849. Late in September they camped in a valley in Montana, and the men went out to hunt. They never returned. While she waited, Janette built a small shelter, moved the wagon stove in with all the provisions and blankets, and hunkered down. She killed the fattest ox from her family’s herd, salted down the meat, and lived alone through the winter, amid howling wolves and mountain lions. She was discovered in April by Indians who were so impressed by her story that they took her to a fort in Washington. She never found out what happened to her family.

When Sam and I were living in Australia, one winter weekend we rented a cottage in the countryside. We toured local wineries by day and at sunset we wrapped ourselves up in blankets on the porch overlooking the valley below, tucking into our bounty of wine and local cheese. I can’t remember who initiated it (OK, fine, probably me), but we decided that during this magic hour while day turned to night we could ask each other anything. This moment in our relationship changed everything. I got to ask all my questions and so did Sam. We also had to answer them. I think for both of us it’s the night we tipped over from infatuation to falling in love. Even now, the phrase ‘wine and cheese hour’ is shorthand for this safe space, when we need to sit down and reconnect. This is so bougie and painful to admit, especially because I don’t even like wine and this is now far more likely to be ‘coffee and Jaffa cake hour’. (Vodka and Pringles works, too.)

Recently I've been having the fantasy more and more" the one where Tack and I run away, disappear under the wide-open sky into the forest with leaves like green hands, welcoming us. In my fantasy, the more we walk, the cleaner we get, like the woods are rubbing away the past few years, all the blood and the fighting and the scars - sloughing off the bad memories and the false starts, leaving us shiny and new, like dolls just taken out of the package. And in this fantasy, my fantasy life, we find a stone cottage hidden deep in the forest, untouched, fitted with beds and rugs and plates and everything we need to live - like the owners just picked up and walked away, or like the house had been built for us and was just waiting all this time. We fish the stream and hunt the woods in the summer. We grow potatoes and peppers and tomatoes big as pumpkins. In the winter we stay inside by the fire while snow falls around us like a blanket, stilling the world, cocooning it in sleep.

Near the exit to the blue patio, DeCoverley Pox and Joaquin Stick stand by a concrete scale model of the Jungfrau, ... socking the slopes of the famous mountain with red rubber hot-water bags full of ice cubes, the idea being to pulverize the ice for Pirate's banana frappes. With their nights' growths of beard, matted hair, bloodshot eyes, miasmata of foul breath, DeCoverley and Joaquin are wasted gods urging on a tardy glacier. Elsewhere in the maisonette, other drinking companions disentangle from blankets (one spilling wind from his, dreaming of a parachute), piss into bathroom sinks, look at themselves with dismay in concave shaving mirrors, slab water with no clear plan in mind onto heads of thinning hair, struggle into Sam Brownes, dub shoes against rain later in the day with hand muscles already weary of it, sing snatches of popular songs whose tunes they don't always know, lie, believing themselves warmed, in what patches of the new sunlight come between the mullions, begin tentatively to talk shop as a way of easing into whatever it is they'll have to be doing in less than an hour, lather necks and faces, yawn, pick their noses, search cabinets or bookcases for the hair of the dog that not without provocation and much prior conditioning bit them last night. Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast:flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which-- though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off--- the genetic chains prove labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations. . . so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects. . . .

Organized religion, to the Third Reich, was in direct competition with serving Germany, for who could pledge an equal allegiance to both the Führer and God? Instead of celebrating Christmas, for example, they celebrated the Winter Solstice. However, no child really chooses his religion; it is just the luck of the draw which blanket of beliefs you are wrapped in. When you are too young to think for yourself, you are baptized and taken to church and droned at by a priest and told that Jesus died for your sins, and since your parents nod and say this is true, why should you not believe them? Much the same was the message we were given by Herr Sollemach and the others who taught us. What is bad is harmful, we were told. What is good is useful. It truly was that simple. When our teachers would put a caricature of a Jew on the board for us to see, pointing at the traits that were associated with inferior species, we trusted them. They were our elders, surely they knew best? Which child does not want his country to be the best, the biggest, the strongest in the world?

Loneliness covers the earth like a blanket. It flows in the stream down through the Callows to the lake. It's in the muck in the yard and the briars in the haggard and the empty outbuildings are bursting with it. It runs down the walls inside of the house like tears and grows on the walls outside like a poisonous choking weed. It's in the sky and the stones and the clouds and the grass. The air is thick with it: you breath it into your lungs and you feel like it might suffocate you. It runs into hollow places like rainwater. It settles on the grass and on trees and takes their shapes and all the earth is wet with it. It has a smell, like the inside of a saucepan: scrapped metal, cold and sharp. When it hits you, it feels like a rap of a hurl across your knuckles on a frosty winter's morning. in PE: sharp, shocking pain, but inside you, so it can't be seen and no one says sorry for causing it nor asks are you ok, and no kind teacher wants to look at it and tut-tut and tell you you'll be grand, good lad. But you know if another man stood where you're standing and looked at the same things he wouldn't see it or feel it.

Dinner was a family affair. And oh, how she enjoyed it! Who knew there was so much to talk about each day? She loved when the men shared stories about their work in the mines, while she often regaled them with stories about life in the castle when she was a small child or about the types of birds she spotted from the window. And then there were the questions. She found she had many! After staying silent for so long, there was much she longed to know, and she was always interested in learning more about the men and their lives. She wanted to know who had carved the beautiful wooden doorways and furniture around the cottage, and why the deer and the birds seemed to linger at the kitchen window while she prepped meals. "They must adore you, as we do," gushed Bashful. "And I you!" Snow would say. She found she could talk to them till the candle burned out each night. It felt like she was finally waking up and finding her voice after years of silent darkness. And while she promised the men she would not do more than her share of the housework, she couldn't help trying to find small ways to repay them for their kindness when she wasn't busy strategizing. Despite their protests, she prepared a lunch basket for them to take to work each day. She mended tiny socks. And secretly, she was using yarn and needles she had found to knit them blankets for their beds. It might have been summer, but she couldn't help noticing they had few blankets for the winter months.

There is a story that illustrates this view. A long time ago in China there lived a very greedy monk. Whenever there was some temple donation, or a distribution of money from a rich layman, this monk was always the first in line. He officiated at many ceremonies, accumulating enough money to buy even the nicest house in town! He was so greedy for money, it seemed he took pleasure only in the joy of collecting it, and never spent any of it. He never even bothered to spend it on himself. His clothes were still quite shabby despite the fact that everyone knew he had a lot of money. “There’s the greedy monk in his ragged clothes,” the laypeople would say. “He’s so cheap he won’t even buy something for himself.” Then one day, it started to rain, and the rain did not stop for several weeks. The little town below the temple was washed out. Houses were destroyed, farms were submerged weeks before the big harvest, and cattle perished. The whole town faced a terrible winter without food or housing. The villagers were very sad and frightened. Then one day, the villagers woke up to find a great number of carts filling the village square. The carts were loaded with many bags of rice and beans, blankets, clothing, and medicine. There were several new ploughs, and four sturdy oxen to pull them! Standing in the middle was the “greedy monk,” in his shabby, patched clothes. He used half his money to buy these supplies, and he gave the rest to the mayor of the town. “I am a meditation monk,” he told the mayor. “Many years ago I perceived that in the future this town would experience a terrible disaster. So ever since then I have been getting money for this day.” When the villagers saw this, they were ashamed of their checking minds. “Waaah, what a great bodhisattva he is!” This is the story of the greedy monk.

Sophie Windham, put that child down and come here.” “You are forever telling me to come here,” she replied, but she put the baby on the floor amid his blankets. “And now I am going away, so humor me.” He held out his arms, and she went into his embrace. “I will not forget you, Sophie. These few days with you and Kit have been my true Christmas.” “I will worry about you.” She held on to him, though not as tightly as she wanted to. “I will keep you in my prayers, as well, but, Sophie, I’ve traveled the world for years and come to no harm. A London snowstorm will not be the end of me.” Still, she did not step back. A lump was trying to form in her throat, much like the lumps that formed when she’d seen Devlin or Bart off after a winter leave. She felt his chin resting on her crown, felt her heart threatening to break in her chest. “I must go to Kent,” he said, his hands moving over her back. “I truly do not want to go—Kent holds nothing but difficult memories for me—but I must. This interlude with you…” She hardly paid attention to his words, focusing instead on his touch, on the sound of his voice, on the clean bergamot scent of him, the warmth he exuded that seeped into her bones like no hearth fire ever had. “…Now let me say good-bye to My Lord Baby.” He did not step back but rather waited until Sophie located the resolve to move away from him. This took a few moments, and yet he did not hurry her. “Say good-bye to Mr. Charpentier, Kit.” She passed him the baby, who gurgled happily in Vim’s arms. “You, sir, will be a good baby for Miss Sophie. None of that naughty baby business—you will remain healthy, you will begin to speak with the words ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ you will take every bath Miss Sophie directs you to take, you will not curse in front of ladies, nor will you go romping where you’re not safe. Do you understand me?” “Bah!” “Miss Sophie, you’re going to be raising a hellion.

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn. When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe! Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God- so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

a guitar. A hammock is swung near the table. It is three o'clock in the afternoon of a cloudy day. MARINA, a quiet, grey-haired, little old woman, is sitting at the table knitting a stocking. ASTROFF is walking up and down near her. MARINA. [Pouring some tea into a glass] Take a little tea, my son. ASTROFF. [Takes the glass from her unwillingly] Somehow, I don't seem to want any. MARINA. Then will you have a little vodka instead? ASTROFF. No, I don't drink vodka every day, and besides, it is too hot now. [A pause] Tell me, nurse, how long have we known each other? MARINA. [Thoughtfully] Let me see, how long is it? Lord—help me to remember. You first came here, into our parts—let me think—when was it? Sonia's mother was still alive—it was two winters before she died; that was eleven years ago—[thoughtfully] perhaps more. ASTROFF. Have I changed much since then? MARINA. Oh, yes. You were handsome and young then, and now you are an old man and not handsome any more. You drink, too. ASTROFF. Yes, ten years have made me another man. And why? Because I am overworked. Nurse, I am on my feet from dawn till dusk. I know no rest; at night I tremble under my blankets for fear of being dragged out to visit some one who is sick; I have toiled without repose or a day's freedom since I have known you; could I help growing old? And then, existence is tedious, anyway; it is a senseless, dirty business, this life, and goes heavily. Every one about here is silly, and after living with them for two or three years one grows silly oneself. It is inevitable. [Twisting his moustache] See what a long moustache I have grown. A foolish, long moustache. Yes, I am as silly as the rest, nurse, but not as stupid; no, I have not grown stupid. Thank God, my brain is not addled yet, though my feelings have grown numb. I ask nothing, I need nothing, I love no one, unless it is yourself alone. [He kisses her head] I had a nurse just like you when I was a child. MARINA. Don't you want a bite of something to eat? ASTROFF. No. During the third week of Lent I went to the epidemic at Malitskoi. It was eruptive typhoid. The peasants were all lying side by side in their huts, and the calves and pigs were running about the floor among the sick. Such dirt there was, and smoke! Unspeakable! I slaved among those people all day, not a crumb passed my lips, but when I got home there was still no rest for me; a switchman was carried in from the railroad; I laid him on the operating table and he went and died in my arms under chloroform, and then my feelings that should have been deadened awoke

The fact is that the estimate of fatalities, in terms of what was calculable at that time—even before the discovery of nuclear winter—was a fantastic underestimate. More than forty years later, Dr. Lynn Eden, a scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, revealed in Whole World on Fire71 the bizarre fact that the war planners of SAC and the Joint Chiefs—throughout the nuclear era to the present day—have deliberately omitted entirely from their estimates of the destructive effects of U.S. or Russian nuclear attacks the effects of fire. They have done so on the questionable grounds that these effects are harder to predict than the effects of blast or fallout, on which their estimates of fatalities are exclusively based, even though, as Eden found, experts including Hal Brode have disputed such conclusions for decades. (A better hypothesis for the tenacious lack of interest is that accounting for fire would reduce the number of USAF warheads and vehicles required to achieve the designated damage levels: which were themselves set high enough to preclude coverage by available Navy submarine-launched missiles.) Yet even in the sixties the firestorms caused by thermonuclear weapons were known to be predictably the largest producers of fatalities in a nuclear war. Given that for almost all strategic nuclear weapons, the damage radius of firestorms would be two to five times the radius destroyed by the blast, a more realistic estimate of the fatalities caused directly by the planned U.S. attacks on the Sino-Soviet bloc, even in 1961, would surely have been double the summary in the graph I held in my hand, for a total death toll of a billion or more: a third of the earth’s population, then three billion. Moreover, what no one would recognize for another twenty-two years were the indirect effects of our planned first strike that gravely threatened the other two thirds of humanity. These effects arose from another neglected consequence of our attacks on cities: smoke. In effect, in ignoring fire the Chiefs and their planners ignored that where there’s fire there’s smoke. But what is dangerous to our survival is not the smoke from ordinary fires, even very large ones—smoke that remained in the lower atmosphere and would soon be rained out—but smoke propelled into the upper atmosphere from the firestorms that our nuclear weapons were sure to create in the cities we targeted. (See chapter 16.) Ferocious updrafts from these multiple firestorms would loft millions of tons of smoke and soot into the stratosphere, where it would not be rained out and would quickly encircle the globe, forming a blanket blocking most sunlight around the earth for a decade or more. This would reduce sunlight and lower temperatures72 worldwide to a point that would eliminate all harvests and starve to death—not all but nearly all—humans (and other animals that depend on vegetation for food). The population of the southern hemisphere—spared nearly all direct effects from nuclear explosions, even from fallout—would be nearly annihilated, as would that of Eurasia (which the Joint Chiefs already foresaw, from direct effects), Africa, and North America. In a sense the Chiefs

We need to be humble enough to recognize that unforeseen things can and do happen that are nobody’s fault. A good example of this occurred during the making of Toy Story 2. Earlier, when I described the evolution of that movie, I explained that our decision to overhaul the film so late in the game led to a meltdown of our workforce. This meltdown was the big unexpected event, and our response to it became part of our mythology. But about ten months before the reboot was ordered, in the winter of 1998, we’d been hit with a series of three smaller, random events—the first of which would threaten the future of Pixar. To understand this first event, you need to know that we rely on Unix and Linux machines to store the thousands of computer files that comprise all the shots of any given film. And on those machines, there is a command—/bin/rm -r -f *—that removes everything on the file system as fast as it can. Hearing that, you can probably anticipate what’s coming: Somehow, by accident, someone used this command on the drives where the Toy Story 2 files were kept. Not just some of the files, either. All of the data that made up the pictures, from objects to backgrounds, from lighting to shading, was dumped out of the system. First, Woody’s hat disappeared. Then his boots. Then he disappeared entirely. One by one, the other characters began to vanish, too: Buzz, Mr. Potato Head, Hamm, Rex. Whole sequences—poof!—were deleted from the drive. Oren Jacobs, one of the lead technical directors on the movie, remembers watching this occur in real time. At first, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then, he was frantically dialing the phone to reach systems. “Pull out the plug on the Toy Story 2 master machine!” he screamed. When the guy on the other end asked, sensibly, why, Oren screamed louder: “Please, God, just pull it out as fast as you can!” The systems guy moved quickly, but still, two years of work—90 percent of the film—had been erased in a matter of seconds. An hour later, Oren and his boss, Galyn Susman, were in my office, trying to figure out what we would do next. “Don’t worry,” we all reassured each other. “We’ll restore the data from the backup system tonight. We’ll only lose half a day of work.” But then came random event number two: The backup system, we discovered, hadn’t been working correctly. The mechanism we had in place specifically to help us recover from data failures had itself failed. Toy Story 2 was gone and, at this point, the urge to panic was quite real. To reassemble the film would have taken thirty people a solid year. I remember the meeting when, as this devastating reality began to sink in, the company’s leaders gathered in a conference room to discuss our options—of which there seemed to be none. Then, about an hour into our discussion, Galyn Susman, the movie’s supervising technical director, remembered something: “Wait,” she said. “I might have a backup on my home computer.” About six months before, Galyn had had her second baby, which required that she spend more of her time working from home. To make that process more convenient, she’d set up a system that copied the entire film database to her home computer, automatically, once a week. This—our third random event—would be our salvation. Within a minute of her epiphany, Galyn and Oren were in her Volvo, speeding to her home in San Anselmo. They got her computer, wrapped it in blankets, and placed it carefully in the backseat. Then they drove in the slow lane all the way back to the office, where the machine was, as Oren describes it, “carried into Pixar like an Egyptian pharaoh.” Thanks to Galyn’s files, Woody was back—along with the rest of the movie.