To enjoy these cold December days I cultivate the mind of winter. I put on my layers for short dog walks. The loops are quicker, around the property and across the dam with the wind to my back. I walk, paying attention to the details. There are patches of snow on the pond ice. Seven swans fly overhead. I tuck my head into my hood while making mental lists of the trees, noticing the grasses dusted with snow. In the insistent breeze a few leaves skitter across the ice. The studio feels warm compared with the outside temperature, but it is only in the 50s so my hat and vest stay on while I work.

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

—Wallace Stevens, Poetry Magazine, 1921