"If summer comes, can spring be far behind?"
By William Wetherall
14 December 2025
Having just finished my 2-week turn to police the neighborhood garbage collection station, I passed the duty roster to the next in line -- one of my 7 fence neighbors.
Either I have a huge lot, or my neighbor's lots are tiny, you might think. In fact, my property includes a very long approach from the street to my home, which sits on a fairly long and narrow back lot. And my neighbor built his new home far from the street alongside mine.
My neighbor keeps a couple of turtles in an enclosure with a pond between his home and mine. The enclosure is covered with a net to keep cats and crows at bay. The turtles can swim in the pond, rest on the bottom, or crawl out to bask in the sun or cool off in the shade on rocks or grass.
I asked my neighbor how they were faring in the cold.
They're hibernating, he said.
Already.
Yeah.
No movement.
No.
No need to feed them.
No.
I wish I could hibernate, I said.
He laughed, then we started talking about the maple tree immediately beside us midway along the approach to his home. It had been in the garden in front of his parents home, which had been on the same lot but near the street. After his mother died a couple of years ago, his father having died several years before that, he built the new home on the back half of the lot and tore down the old one to sell the front half -- but not before transplanting the maple to the font of his new home.
It is the deepest, richest purple I have every seen. And it was still had many leaves to drop a week before the winter solstice.
Winter skys are the clearest, deepest, and darkest. In the foothills of the Sierras, where I grew up in my teens -- on a terrace in a clearing on the top of a ridge, ringed by ponderosa pines and incense cedars -- the bottoms of the nights were whitest under the Milky Way in winter. There wasn't a star or nebula on the naked-eye magnitude chart that I couldn't see.
I have rarely glimpsed even a dim suggestion of the Milky Way where I live in Japan, on the fringes of the suburban sprawl around Tokyo. But I can see more in mid winter than at any other time of year -- enough for me to imagine the rest.
My only complaint about winter is not the cold outside but in my home. It's old, uninsulated, and drafty. I warm the kitchen by opening the refrigerator door. Wouldn't life be nicer to fall asleep in the eve of autumn, and wake up at the dawn of spring?
Come to think of it, though, that would be boring and lifeless.
I'd miss the barrenness of winter plum and cherry trees that makes their blooming in spring worth waiting to witness. And I'd miss the stirring of the rain frogs arousing from their winterless slumber in another fence neighbor's yard.
Besides, autumn needs winter to mourn its fallen leaves. And without its winter metaphor, Shelley's poem would lose its elegant pathos.
Last revised 24 January 2026