Last week I noticed green shoots, where the snowdrops and daffodils will grow, outside the bungalow. I also spotted winter heliotrope—starry, vanilla-scented flowers with kidney-shaped leaves—wrapped around the writing shed of a farmer Anna and I visited in Mohill on Sunday. The writing shed was cobbled together from discarded wood and corrugated steel and heated by a tiny brown stove from a council estate house under renovation. Huddled around the stove, we listened as the farmer read his story about the local tradition of hanging cow placentas on hawthorn trees, us imagining soft, wet, otherworldly masses dripping blood and amniotic fluid in moonlight, wards against privation. On Tuesday snow fell, and I think how I am like the winter heliotrope, in my love for this time of year. Fascinated by the snow, I take any opportunity to walk up and down Main Street, just to crunch snow under my feet.

Before the snow arrived, my thoughts had turned dark; the landscape of my inner self was obscured by inpenetrable and seemingly everlasting fog. Only now I’m realising that I’ve been hibernating: hanging out in bear caves (aka sitting room, the castle cafe); reading slower; writing notes, sometimes the same ones; making the same observations over and over again; sitting or lying in the same spot for hours or days or weeks, just thinking; eating sparingly, or alot all at once; doing none of the things you said you’d do. One nearly mistakes hibernation for paralysis. But it is only the in-spooling of energy, further and further inward, a retreat from all things worldly, if only to conserve your spirit. It can be enjoyable. Lean into the quiet cold darkness, as if it is a pillow.

For in winter the soil is only quiescent. Minute by minute the days lengthen. Plans start to knit together. Words are summoned, "bird by bird". Ambition begins to leaf again. A great thaw, of earth and body and spirit, is upon us.

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