Solitude is best part of winter season

The farm is a lonely place in winter. The lake has frozen over forcing all the ducks toward warmer climes and as a result, our guest duck hunters have packed up their decoys and their flat-bottom boats and cleared out.

To add to the feeling of isolation is a tree-line bereft of leaves, the lack of dimension on all the surrounding fields, the long nights of darkness and, today, the first of December, a wind-driven snow. Anyone who prefers activity to solitude would find Four Cedars in winter a difficult place to be.

But that's not me. For me, solitude is a tonic that helps me make sense of a world that spins on an axis of materialism. I come to the farm because life is simpler here (not easier, mind you); here, I can revel in my most basic self. The wind, the flat land, even the animals won't ask me to live up to standards that I can't possibly, and they won't judge me when I fail.

Here, I simply exist the same way the dormant plants and tattered buildings exist. Here, deadlines or schedules aren't a factor and this allows my mind to drift like the snow. Who knows where my thoughts will settle? Maybe I'll dream up a story, get creative in the kitchen, or turn off my brain and just take a nap. That's what one can do when it's quiet, here at the farm in winter.