Editorial: Winter Folklore
As a child growing up in Colorado, I equated winter with gut-plunging snowbanks and crashing icicles, cold blue days and crystalline nights. Later, I moved to Arizona, and while winter in the Sonoran Desert wears its own brand of beauty, I missed skating on the rippled ice of a frozen mountain lake, the deep quiet of snow-mantled forests, and the wonder of fat, fluffy snowflakes melting on my tongue. Life’s path often leads home, so perhaps it’s no surprise that I eventually returned to Colorado only to discover the season shorter, less severe than the ones from my youth. Yet, the call of winter remains strong for me.
When searching for a theme I wanted to explore, I reflected on time I’d once spent with a Navajo medicine man. He taught me that certain tales can only be told in winter when the world is at rest. This tradition can be found among cultures around the globe. In a way, this issue extends the conversation featured in last month’s The EcoFutures Issue, albeit with a darker twist. Lately, my news feeds loudly proclaim the approach of an impending “new little ice age,” a prediction that at first seems at odds with current concerns associated with global warming. Yet, as temperatures race towards those that preceded Earth’s last climate collapse, this is exactly what might happen. After the heat comes the cold.
And so, this issue celebrates the cold quietude of my favorite season with stories that lean into winter folktale and oral traditions, which is perfectly illustrated by the cover art by Jeanie Tomanek, a self-taught artist known for exploring archetypal images from fairy tales, folklore, and myth. In Tomanek’s “Winter,” an ominous shadow looms in the background, as much of the landscape as the barren trees and the snow-covered field. And the girl in the center, that archetypal figure in red, stares back. Whether in fear or acceptance, defiance or denial, is left up to interpretation. Isn’t that what folklore is all about?
This issue opens with Allison Pang’s “A Promise of Persimmons, a haunting tale of an avalanche victim who refuses to stay buried and, instead, returns home—a changed woman. The theme of love and loss continues in “The Heartbreaker’s Apprentice” by Catherine George. Apply for the job if you dare. “The only qualification: You must have a heart of ice.”
Sometimes, the price we pay for love is more brutal, more shattering, than a broken heart. In “The Northerner’s Tale,” Jason P. Burnham explores the sacrifices a desperate father is willing to make in order to save his dying daughter. But, as we learn soon enough in Daniel Roop’s “Spoon, Fork, Knife,” family and sacrifice can take an ominous turn, especially when it comes to cutting weather. Darkness falls, but the promise of persimmons stains the snow red.
And then there are the stories of endless winter. You know the ones. What will it take to break the bitter loneliness trapped in the enduring cold? An old woman climbs a mountain to find the answer to that question, and more, in M. R. Robinson’s chilling tale “The Hag of Beinn Nibheis.” But not all are eager to see the end of winter, including a researcher of urban legends who finds her true purpose when her truck breaks down on an isolated road in “Moist Breath of a Cold Stranger” by KT Wagner.
At the end, as this issue comes to a close, we are reminded once again of home and what it means for each of us. I realize I am one of the lucky ones. When I wearied of sweltering days that stretched into years, I had a homeland to return to, jagged peaks that still embrace winter, even as so much of the world continues to melt. In the final story of this issue, “The Ice Cutter’s Daughter and Her Looking Glass,” Nadia Born turns the reflection back to the reader and the future we might share if we continue on this path of a perpetual global summer, a place where “there’s no such thing as ice” and snow-filled skies are but a distant memory.
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Ⓒ Carina Bissett