Figure 1 – Leaf of autumn in the snow of winter, Audubon Habitat Wildlife Refuge, Belmont, MA. October 31, 2020. (c) DE Wolf 2021.

The seasons are symbolic of transition and passage. Spring waxes to summer, summer to fall, and then the waning of fall to winter, and finally rebirth winter to spring, then spring back to summer. It seems so appropriate to think of this in “Our winter of discontent.” Figure 1 is an image that I took after our first real snow back in October – it shows the precise instant of liminal passage from glorious autumn to a beautiful winter. It was an image taken in the muffled quietude of fresh snow at the Habitat Wildlife Refuge in Belmont, MA on October 31, 2020; so really still fall technically, although there is a discrepancy between astronomical and meteorological fall.

The golden leaf seems to shiver in the cold. Perhaps it was left behind to remind us of summer’s glory by Persephone on her journey to her winter in the underworld. It is a journey that she must endure for eating in desperation a few pomegranate seeds, which are a symbol of the indissolubility of her marriage to Hades.

Now that I am starting to see the buds and twig colors and the first robins that augur the coming of spring, I am thinking back three months to the moment of passage captured in this photograph.