You have to start winter the same way you start a quarentine, by knowing it will end. So that when the holdidays are finished, and the bulk of winter lays spread bare before you, a gutted fish; white meat packed against the bones like wedged feathers, that the isolation, the Styrofoam silence the white padded lawns and dusted sidewalks that show every stain, every ungraceful mistep will eventually melt beneath the sun, seep into the earth, water the seeds of what if.