In Defense of New England Winters
Every year around November, people I know start complaining about winter. The days getting shorter, the cold settling in, the general dread of what's coming. I understand the impulse. New England winters are long. They're gray. They involve a lot of inconvenience — scraped windshields, frozen pipes if you're unlucky, the slow creep of road salt into everything you own. I get why someone would prefer to live somewhere warmer.
But I don't actually mind it. I've lived in this part of the country for long enough that winter feels less like an ordeal and more like a season with its own particular rhythm, one I've come to appreciate and in some ways prefer to the others. I realize that's an unusual position, so I thought I'd try to explain it.
The most practical benefit is forced indoor time. I'm the kind of person who always has a backlog of projects — files to organize, things to read, small tools to build, writing to finish. During the warmer months there's a constant low-level guilt about not being outside. The weather is nice, and it feels wrong to spend a Saturday afternoon reorganizing a hard drive when you could be doing something outdoors. Winter removes that guilt entirely. When it's twenty degrees and dark by four-thirty, nobody expects you to be outside. You can sit at your desk with a clear conscience and work through the stack of things you've been putting off since August.
I get more done between December and March than I do in the entire rest of the year combined. That's not an exaggeration. Something about the short days and the cold makes it easy to settle into long, focused stretches of work. There are fewer interruptions. Fewer social obligations. Fewer reasons to leave the house. For someone with my temperament — someone who likes quiet, likes routine, likes having a project to chip away at — it's ideal.
Reading picks up significantly in winter too. I keep a stack of books on my desk year-round, but in summer they tend to sit there gathering dust. In winter I actually work through them. There's a particular quality to reading on a cold evening that I haven't been able to replicate at any other time of year. Something about the contrast between the warmth inside and the cold outside makes concentration easier. Or maybe I'm just rationalizing a preference. Either way, most of my reading gets done between Thanksgiving and the spring thaw.
Then there's shoveling. I know this is where I'll lose most people, but I genuinely enjoy shoveling snow. Not the heavy, wet, back-breaking kind that comes in late March — that's just labor. But the regular shoveling after a normal snowfall, the kind where you go out in the early morning before anyone else is up and clear the walkway and the driveway in the quiet — that I find almost meditative. It's simple physical work with a clear beginning and end. You can see exactly what you've accomplished. Your mind wanders in useful ways while your body does something repetitive and satisfying. It's not unlike washing dishes or splitting kindling in that respect. The task is humble enough that your thoughts are free to go elsewhere.
The quiet of a snowy morning is worth mentioning on its own. If you've experienced it, you know what I mean, and if you haven't, it's hard to describe adequately. Snow dampens sound. A fresh snowfall, especially overnight, transforms the usual morning noise into something close to silence. You step outside and the world is muffled. No traffic sounds, no distant machinery, just the soft crunch under your boots. I'm not a particularly spiritual person, but those mornings are the closest I come to what other people might describe as a sense of peace. They happen maybe a dozen times a winter, and each one feels like a small gift.
My heating situation contributes to the appreciation, I think. I have a wood stove that does most of the work in the main living area, supplemented by the regular heating system for the rest of the house. There's a whole routine around the stove — bringing in wood, building the fire, managing the damper, cleaning out the ash. It's one more small maintenance task layered onto the day, but I like maintenance tasks. The stove puts out a different kind of heat than forced air, drier and more radiant, and the process of tending it gives the day a structure. Morning fire, afternoon reload, evening banking. It's a rhythm that makes you pay attention to the passage of time in a way that a thermostat doesn't.
Clothing is part of the rhythm too. I've developed opinions about layering that I'll spare you the details of, but the short version is that dressing for cold weather is a problem I enjoy solving. Base layer, insulating layer, shell. Wool socks. A hat that actually covers your ears. Gloves that let you operate a zipper. There's a satisfaction in going outside when it's genuinely cold and being comfortable because you prepared for it. It's a small competence, but I'll take competence where I can find it.
And coffee. I drink coffee year-round, but it's a different experience in winter. In July, coffee is just caffeine delivery — you drink it because you're in the habit and you need to wake up. In January, that first cup is warmth itself. You hold the mug and feel it in your fingers. The steam rises. The house is still cold because the stove hasn't caught up yet. That cup of coffee is doing real, immediate, physical good, and you appreciate it in a way that's impossible when it's seventy-five degrees outside.
I think the deepest reason I value winter, though, is what it does to spring. When spring arrives in New England, it feels earned. You lived through something. The first warm day in April, when you can open a window without bracing yourself, when the air smells like mud and thaw instead of woodsmoke — that day hits differently when you've spent four months in the cold. People who live in mild climates get pleasant weather year-round, and I don't begrudge them that, but I wonder if any random Tuesday in San Diego has ever felt as revelatory as the first real spring day in New England. I doubt it. You need the contrast.
None of this is to say that winter doesn't have its miserable stretches. February, in particular, can be bleak. The novelty of snow is gone, the holidays are over, and spring is still far enough away that it doesn't feel real. I usually deal with this by leaning harder into the routine — more projects, more reading, more time with the stove. It passes. It always passes.
I don't expect to convince anyone. If you hate winter, you hate it, and a blog post from someone who spends most of his time organizing files and tending a wood stove probably isn't going to change your mind. But for what it's worth, I think winter gets a bad reputation it doesn't entirely deserve, at least up here. It's a season that rewards a certain kind of patience and a certain kind of temperament. I happen to have both, or at least I like to think I do.
— K. Vadala