Lucka 15

"New York in December"

av Marie Viljeon

The skies of these winter days are crystalline and blue and if there is a snow-fall every ugliness of the city is softened for some suspended hours beneath it. We contemplate the stark architecture of trees. Beneath their bare branches the city exhales plumes of steam from orange air vents. Fallen brown leaves still crunch underfoot and all growth seems withheld without doubt, but in Chinatown and Cobble Hill, pale pink blossoms confuse passersby who think that The End has come: the vernal cherries are in bloom. ... 

Despite the lack of change in the little garden, it is precisely this long, chilly, suspended rest that gives meaning to the other side of the year and that makes possible, come spring, to contemplate planting tomatoes, yet again. Winter forgives us the crime of endlessly repeating ourselves. We wait.

That is what winter is. And without the wait, and without the emptiness, and without the browning and drying and blowing away, the cold, the frozen pots, the bareness, the shriveled herb leaves, the sticks of fig and rose, without the white pillows of snow, the spare horizon, spring would be nothing. How unbearable, a constant awakening, a continuous rising up, like remaining awake at a party that won’t end. We need sleep. We need to be empty.

It is the only possible preparation for the excess to come.  

Ur 66 Square Feet: A Delicious Life, s. 209, 213)