"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 and tore down the old old to sell its half of the lot -- 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 had just started to drop its leaves, a week before the winter solstice.
Winter skys are my favorite as they are the clearest and darkest. In the foothills of the Sierras, where I grew up in my teens, the bottom of the night of my neighborhood -- on a terrace in a clearing on the top of a ridge, fenced by ponderosa pines and incense cedars -- the bottom 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 seen 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 to enable 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 at the end of autumn, and wake up at the start of spring?
Come to think of it, though, that would be boring and lifeless.
I'd miss the barrenness of winter trees that makes their blooming in spring worth surviving to witness. And I'd miss the stirring of the rain frogs coming out of their winterless slumber in another fence neighbor's garden.
And without its winter metaphor, Shelley's poem would lose its elegant pathos.
Last revised 15 December 2025