Winter Liminality
Winter Liminality
Alicia Pollard
I sat entranced, curled up in a dark green armchair, working through my Finite Math homework and listening to a song about the stars by OneRepublic through my earphones. The winter wind whipped snow-ghosts from the drifts outside. I smiled as I heard the clip-clop of hooves and a buggy rattling by; we were deep in Amish country, and the sound made me feel like an Austen or Brontë heroine.
2014 was brand new. My older sister and I returned to school early from Christmas break to take intersession courses. It was cheaper to live off-campus, and one of her friends had a grandmother who lived nearby and graciously let our group camp out in her home. Her house was a small early-twentieth-century build nestled among tall hemlocks.
It was one of the coldest winters we’d experienced. One day, the temperature dropped to –35°F, forcing the school to cancel classes for the first time in thirty years. The skies were an iron gray, and the long fields and thick woodlands of the Pennsylvania countryside were feet-deep in iced-over snow. Winds rattled the windowpanes. It was warm inside; cozy lamplight on dark wood paneling and wainscotting, friendly creaks in the floorboards and stairs, cream-colored wallpaper painted with purple lavender. In the evenings, a boyfriend or two would drop by to help make chicken stir-fry or beef stew, chocolate shortbread or brownies. We ate a lot of dark-chocolate-covered coffee beans until we calculated that five of them equal a whole cup of coffee. The older girls joked amongst themselves to keep up their morale through 200+ pages of reading a night for their “Modern Civilization” course: texts like The Education of Henry Adams, Ideas have Consequences, Amusing Ourselves to Death, and Coming Apart.
Curled in my armchair, I worked out math problems involving fair division, probability, and puzzles like the Seven Bridges Problem. When my mind felt jammed with numbers, I grabbed my laptop and continued Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities from Gutenberg Press. The magic that Dickens casts on all settings and characters, from majestic to mundane, wove in and around me as the winds circled the house: whispered images like Madame Defarge’s fateful knitting, spilled wine in the streets, echoed footsteps, and the brooding darkness of the Marquis Evrémonde’s chateau were cast like spells through the house, lending my own ordinary life a sense of grandeur and mystery.
*
It was my freshman year of college. I had schemed and studied and worked through my first semester and had already planned my next, filling in classes and clubs and jobs like answers to a crossword puzzle: English and drama courses for my major, Biblical courses for my minor, literary journals and Bible studies for extracurriculars. In those years, everything felt like a desperate filling-in and throwing-together: devouring classics like Dickens so you had a good answer when people asked what you were reading, juggling paper-writing and hours at the gym with poetry committee meetings and washing dishes in the cafeteria, panicking by March if you didn’t have a summer internship lined up, striving and comparing and measuring how much you could do, how good you could look. Taking a winter intersession course was just another step in the Success Plan, just enough to get me ahead to graduate early.
But those frenzied college days were beautiful, too. Rediscovering the world through the kennings of Beowulf and the mind-bending conceits of the Metaphysical poets; tiptoeing around the baby rabbit nests that Campus Safety marked with traffic cones on the quad; watching stunning performances of Les Misérables and The Bell of Amherst; walking to town to get hazelnut mochas with my roommate; wandering campus when it was white with new snow and golden with twinkling Christmas lights. Dickens’s opening lines to A Tale of Two Cities are over-quoted, but they rang true for my freshman year:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us...
My life was nowhere near as tumultuous or dangerous as revolutionary France, but I was still a teenager, and the hyperbolic comparison made me feel important. The contrasts in the book between freedom and imprisonment, compassion and cruelty, revenge and justice, Charles Darnay and Sydney Carlton, London and Paris illuminated the contrasts in my own busy student life with a new splendor. Late nights reading Canterbury Tales or the Life of Paul; trying to ignore other students’ Tumblr feeds while typing notes in class; staring glumly at my impossibly frizzy hair in the dorm bathroom mirror; listening to boys serenade other girls in our hall from the courtyard — all of it seemed richer through the lens of story. My life had beauty and stress, insecurity and wonder, delight and weariness. The one thing missing was rest.
The song by OneRepublic played through my soul that day, adding a new layer to my ponderings:
“No more counting dollars
We'll be counting stars…”
The song articulated my deep fears and deep yearnings as a freshman: counting dollars (I already saw myself as the English major who would never find a job) and counting stars from far away, trying to do everything right, afraid of mistakes and failure and loss. In that liminal space between fall and spring, endings and beginnings, stress in the present and longing for the future, I found arbors of calm in the words of a song or the pages of a story.
*
Sometimes the only way out is through. In those brief two weeks we spent at the house among the hemlocks, I didn’t find a single revelation that resolved the contrasts in my life. I never found a permanent way to replace stress with peace or yearning with contentment. But those precious fourteen days confirmed something I discovered in high school: amid chaos and busyness, frustration and hurt, good books and good music were a refuge. That refuge was a reminder.
Through all the dichotomies of violence and healing, goodwill and malice, death and deliverance in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens drives a single, unifying principle: resurrection. Beginning with the coded message “Recalled to Life,” and ending with John 11:25, “‘I am the Resurrection and the Life,’” Dickens finds the miracle that reconciles pain and love, overthrows death, conquers evil, and overturns tragedy. Resurrection is more than death’s opposite: it is death’s conqueror, the obliteration of suffering, the end of evil. A Tale of Two Cities ends with a hopeful grief and triumphant sacrifice that echoes the victory of Christ.
Winter in frozen farmland, the dark time of the year, is the best time to think of both the Incarnation and the Resurrection. For me, the exhausted days of wonder and stress forced me to take refuge in truthful stories and songs just as winter forced us to shelter indoors. The coziness was not just a temporary relief—it foretold the coming spring. I didn’t find peace in the waiting and striving, not really. But I did find hope in dreaming.
Small, brittle snowflakes fell in the deadened world outside. As I calculated algorithms and matrices, inputs and outcomes, my study music and study breaks with Dickens became more than retreats; they were reminders that there was a better life beyond all my effort and desire, a life I didn’t have to earn. The warring contrasts of life and death, light and darkness, hope and despair, best and worst all are resolved in Resurrection.
Alicia Pollard
Writer & Student
Alicia has been published in Peacock Journal, An Unexpected Journal, & Transpositions
Photography by Jonathan Kemper