Winter in eastern Idaho, where I make my home, can be, as in many other parts of the world, a gloomy, bitter, miserable Jezebel. The wind is biting and brutal and incessant, leaving hands and faces burned and chapped after five minutes of exposure. It takes a car a good 15 minutes to get sufficiently warmed up in the mornings, and even then, the roads never seem to be clear enough to make driving an enjoyable endeavor. The sun comes up late and goes down painfully early, forcing us to be content with whatever vitamin D our now-contraband incandescent light bulbs can muster (none).
Yet, in many ways, winter, which ought to loosening her grip about the time you get this issue, is a genuinely beautiful time. The very air that stings the toes and bites the nose is somehow invigorating when that first breath is taken in upon stepping onto the porch on a morning whose sheer brightness is simply unattainable in greener times of the year. Winter is a season of sledding and skiing and snowmobiling and pheasant hunting.
It’s also when the swans come down. Trumpeter swans are a fairly common sight on mountain lakes and rivers here in eastern Idaho, but you don’t see them down in the valley until the bitterest part of winter. They’re massive birds, with adult wingspans of around seven feet and weights often in excess of 30 pounds. They’re also gorgeous animals, exuding an air of the romance with which they’ve become associated as they float on the water or fly past overhead.
Along my commute to work, there’s a small private pond that I have to assume is fed by a natural warm spring, because it almost never freezes over. I don’t know who owns it, and I’ve only seen it from my car, but I love that pond. It’s here that I see the swans each morning on my way to work. I’m usually not in the best of moods after scraping my windshield in the dark and navigating the ice-packed country roads, but as I approach that little pond and see at least a couple dozen swans floating there, calm and beautiful, I always get an unexplainable feeling of both excitement and serenity.
I don’t know why, but the swans have some sort of hold on me, and I love it. When I see them, my day is made better.
Maybe this is ridiculous, but the swans are one of my favorite things about winter. There’s a lot to complain about in the middle of February in eastern Idaho, but those swans, for me at least, remind me of all the good I have I my life—a beautiful family, a great job, a warm home and loyal friends and a car that runs.
I have a friend from my youth who once gave me this sage advice about success in life: “Remember the good and forget the bad.” Coming from this particular friend, I took it seriously, because I had seen that mantra change his very life. When I first met him, we shared a lot of interests and he made me laugh, but he was sarcastic and bitter, convinced that the world was out to get him. There had been some perceived slights from people he had respected in the recent past, and he wasn’t about to let those negatives go. I’m not sure what changed for him, but in the course of a year I saw him turn into a warm, welcoming, sincere human being who sincerely wanted the best of those around him and who had learned that trust was simply more pleasant than skepticism.
Look, there are always, always, going to be reasons to be upset, annoyed, or just generally grumpy. But is it really worth it? Let the little things brighten your day, like a baby’s smile or a heartwarming story on the local news.
Or some swans on an anonymous neighbor’s pond.