Yesterday was the winter solstice. Today, it feels like the sun didn’t even rise. There’s the residue of it, the low-seeped daylight behind the clouds, but there’s no warmth; no casting of light upon the pavement. Just a gray sky the color of wet stones.

We live in the Pacific Northwest, but I find it easy to imagine the endless nights they have in the arctic; the sun weak and flickering, barely making its short arc above the horizon. If you go far enough north, all the way up to the pole, the sun truly does disappear, blocked entirely by the curve of the Earth, and there is only darkness for months at a time.

Here, it’s the clouds that keep the sun from us. And there’s no consolation to that, no aurora borealis or aurora australis flickering across the constellations like some ancient green fire; no sparkling plains of snow.

In our dreary winters the best we have are the saturated greens of the fir and cedar, and the mist rising from them like curtains of smoke; entire hillsides so darkened by rain that they turn to black velvet. And those trees are blanketed with moss, the kind that holds on to water long after it has rained, droplets left hanging in threads, and there are the tree ferns, too; licorice ferns. They sprout up on the maple branches or sometimes the cedars, hanging over and air-bound like some tropical bromeliad.

And, at times, even the gray sky has a beauty to it, but only in those moments before the rain is heavy, when the sky condenses and bruises itself to what is almost purple; those moments when you can feel the wind change directions, the quickened pace of it, and the big gusts pushing so heavily against the trees that they sound like they might fall.

On those kinds of days the river matches the sky, the water swift and wrinkled with movement, and you can smell in the wind the scent of woodfire smoke, somewhere off in someone’s fireplace, and the smell of winter, and the indescribable smell of the rain as it hits the water, somehow so similar to the smell of the soil, of dried mud, of fallen leaves, of pollen. And, though you still long for the sun, you can, on those days, see the sky not as gray, but as silver.