Winter

Winter gives the book a sensory threshold between the narrator’s grieving present and an earlier life with her friend. Cold appears at the window and on the street, but it also shapes the repeated act of walking: first as part of the friend’s writing rhythm, and later as a way for the narrator and Apollo to spend time together.

Winter as a Threshold of Memory

While lying in bed in the middle of the day, the narrator has been crying so hard that her vision blurs; a headache has throbbed for days. She gets up and looks through the window. Though the room is cold and a draft comes through, pressing her forehead against the icy glass feels good. As her eyes refuse to clear, fear rises at the thought of women who cried themselves blind.

Then she sees her friend walking outside in a brown vintage bomber jacket, too tight but all the better for it, with dark, thick, long hair. The image tells her that the scene belongs nearly thirty years in the past. Winter therefore frames an abrupt passage from bodily distress into remembered time: the glass is at once a cold surface in the present and the vantage point from which the narrator recognizes her friend in an earlier life.

Walking, Weather, and the Writing Rhythm

The remembered friend is strolling without an errand or appointment, hands in pockets and savoring the street. Walking is not incidental to the friend’s work. After writing in the morning, the friend would reach a point when even a simple sentence seemed impossible, then go out and walk for miles. The practice joined physical movement to the return of language: back at the desk, the friend tried to preserve the rhythm established on the walk, and better writing followed when that rhythm held.

Cold and rain rarely prevented these walks; only a real storm could stop them. The account makes winter part of the friend’s working conditions rather than merely an obstacle to them. The friend’s conviction that good sentences begin with a beat connects the pace of walking to the cadence of prose, giving the season a place in the narrator’s recollection of how the friend wrote.

Winter Walks with Apollo

In a later winter, after the semester ends, the narrator tells her family she cannot travel to be with them for Christmas. The monthlong break before teaching resumes means she will hardly ever have to be apart from Apollo. They walk and walk even in the coldest weather, and the narrator describes both of them as liking the cold and the city in winter.

The season changes the conditions of their shared walks. The sidewalks have more room and fewer gawkers; in freezing weather, Apollo is also less likely to stop for one of his rests. Set beside the earlier memory of the friend walking to recover a writing rhythm, these outings make winter a recurring setting for companionship through movement. The remembered friend and Apollo are not interchangeable, but the repeated winter walk links the narrator’s past and present through a concrete habit: going out into the cold and continuing along the street.