It is said that winter, being the season when the sun shines on us obliquely, is a period of death, or, as the dictionary puts it, of “dreariness, old age and decay.” We are being deprived of a portion of original energy, and recognize occasionally that if we were out far enough, in as extreme and bare a relationship to the cold as the birds, but without their equivalent in insulation, we would have a hard time surviving (though birds are also perishable and have their share of disease and death from starvation). But we take care of ourselves, in such an elaborate and consuming way, that the grand extremes of weather may only succeed in being a nuisance. The freezing weather deepens this month, after a few days of moderate warmth at the start, and I am free to complain about the heat bills. The car skids and turns a half circle on the highway, which is covered with glare ice one morning, and I am afraid, not for myself so much as for my new car. How could I manage that ten miles back without it? Self-protection may be all that winter means to us, though it is a term that can only be comparative in an age of manufactured violence. Suddenly there is a tremendous thud above us that jars and rocks the house. It seems to tug at the vitals of the earth and would cause us more than mere shock if we were not aware that it is a plane breaking the sound barrier, thousands of feet in the air. A minute or two later I hear a familiar gabbling, a mixed bugling, overhead, and run out to see twenty Canada geese, hurrying fast down the north wind in four separate flocks aligned in flight. With their long necks stretched out and strong wings beating they are fleeing for their lives, frightened up from winter feeding grounds along the shores of Cape Cod Bay. The earth, for the time being at least, is committed to mankind. The geese cannot so frighten _us_. They are innocent of ways to “control their environment.” Then there is almost complete silence again, and I understand what is meant by the “dead of winter.” Under the cold blue stare of the sky nothing seems to be happening. Each sound--a crow cawing, a car on the road, the rustle and clink of a clump of dead oak leaves--is by itself, occupying wide, unpopulated plains. Without the wind, the air too presses on me, with a cold weight. I walk through its depths, feeling it against my face, and suddenly realize that limited sea of oxygen in which we live, this side of outer space and its violet darkness.