The last two months in Provincetown have seen the warm fall slowly give way to winter. And it has been a pretty feisty winter so far. In The Holdfast, Silas has some thoughts on watching his first winter approach:
Autumn in Provincetown was something he was still learning to read. Back in the mountain West, winter came on like a switch. One minute the aspens were shimmering yellow, whispering their chorus in the wind—and the next, they were bare and it was howling, full-on winter.
Out here, winter crept in slow, first disguised as rain. The warm ocean held the cold off, so winter took its time, wrapping its arms around the town little by little. He’d read in a book of poems that the cold touched the puddles first, then the kettle ponds—freezing their edges at night, releasing them again by day.
. . . The signs were there, all around him. The beaches, swollen with summer sand, were beginning to give it back to the sea. The seals had thinned; soon the big sharks would vanish. And by December, the last of the southbound migratory birds would move on.
