Desert Places

For some reason, the first weeks of winter (true, pure winter) always bring to my mind the works of Robert Frost. Most of the year I think him trite, but for the first few weeks of winter I find he is the poet who best verbalizes what I see in the world.

Winters in my homestate of Delaware were never very Robert Frost-like. Sure it was cold and we sometimes got snow, but there was never the really opressive blankness and loneliness that is part of Frost. The glory of a Delaware winter is a good early-morning frost on the reeds in the swamp or the town Christmas lights being lit on your way home from a late day at the office.

I was first introduced to Frost winters when I was in college in central Pennsylvania. We were in the rolling hills just south of the Allegheney Mountains, surrounded by patches of woods and fields that generally had snow in them all winter. Late at night, driving to and from the small town where school was, I was always struck by the emptiness of it all, by the tiredness of it all. There were no street lights, so the moon just bounced off the patches of snow and gave a sad brightness to everything. I always found myself going over Frost poetry on those rides.

Today I was reminded of my old winter friend once again, although this time the woods were on the Balkan Mountains and the empty fields were on the Thracian Plain. This afternoon I went shopping in Sliven and met the new volunteer there (who, by the by, is from DELAWARE!). The whole day had been rainy and gray, but when I got off the bus the rain had turned to wet snow and a terrible, bitter wind was raging down from the mountains. It was almost hard to walk for the wind, and it was incredibly cold. As the sun went down the snow and wind were replaced by the same kind of chill-to-the-bone dampness I had grown so accustomed to in Pennsylvania. And as the bus headed across the plain to Straldja, I watched the rocky, now-snow-covered mountains give way to smaller, wooded hills, and again thought to myself:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it -- it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less --
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars -- on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Of course this winter for me, more than any before it, will truly live up to the lines of this poem. I was profoundly alone this summer, and slowly I am coming to love the loneliness. This winter cannot scare me...I have seen my own desert places, and now I know they are beautiful.