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Our December Sip & Read Book Club Selection is Katherine May's "Wintering"

Photo credit: Victor Maze
Photo credit: Victor Maze

From Veranda

Welcome to the VERANDA Sip & Read Book Club! Each month, we dive in to a book and offer exclusive conversations with the authors behind each tale over on Instagram, along with a perfectly matched cocktail. This month's pick is Katherine May's "Wintering," an intimate study of healing and reflection during the coldest times of the year. Get caught up on our past book club selections here.

Photo credit: Sara Norling
Photo credit: Sara Norling



Life was not always this way for author and memoirist Katherine May, with a son unable to attend school, a husband who falls ill, and herself overcome by a mysterious illness, all within a span of six months. But then again, nothing in nature is ever stagnant. Why would we think we would be either?

Such is the starting point of May's latest release, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. And if there was one book to read this December (with a gentle fire, perhaps? If the air is crisp enough outside where you are), it's this one, a gentle, inward exploration of a season of challenges in May's life and the ways in which she embraces the opportunities the changes offer her.

It's not without struggle, of course. May's husband's illness causes her days to become "simultaneously tense and slack: I was constantly required to be somewhere and awake and vigilant...I spent a lot of time staring around me, wondering what to do, my mind churning to categorize these new experiences, to find a context for them."

This may sound like a tidy summary of your lived experience this year; it certainly felt so to me. The thought launches May deeper into the explorations at the heart of Wintering: How can we embrace this season of life—when the cold seeps through the cracks of the doorways and mind simultaneously—in order to better prepare ourselves for the days approaching after the thaw? What lessons on healing, resting, and recuperating can we take from the natural world and societies around the globe who live amid the dark and cold for far more of the year than the rest of us?

The work of this season, the cold season, is to embrace the spaces that life gives us to inhabit—and learn to welcome them. May ruminates on her experience at Iceland's Blue Lagoon and Stonehenge; the essential Finnish tradition of the sauna, on solstice church celebrations and Samhain; the writings of C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath; and the practice of swimming in frigid winter waters.

Photo credit: elkaphotos
Photo credit: elkaphotos

Of the sauna, she writes, "I imagine myself sitting contentedly in the hot, pine twilight of the sauna, drinking in mystic wisdom, and improving my pores to no end."

May's writing has a delicate humor to it, a cheekiness that marries well with the introspection of the book's topic. The narrative unfolds at a gentle pace, and yet I found that I couldn't put the book down. I'd step away to complete a task only to return to the pages a short time later, eager to surround myself with the metamorphosis chronicled inside. When she begins a practice of swimming in freezing waters off the coast her home in Whitstable, Kent, she writes that "we have crossed a glorious brave unspoken line." The waters bring her a surprisingly community, and in the sharp-but-soothing practice of cold-water swimming, they bare their souls to one another, letting the cold "unburden" them of their "own personal winters" in order to forge a path toward healing.

This is not a rushed endeavor (which is precisely the point). There are no speedy car chases, no tense battles or arguments—and in this lies its beauty. Wintering is perfectly timed for now: the season before a new year, a new U.S. president, a new (hopefully brief) phase of the coronavirus pandemic. "We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how," May aptly writes, and her treatise to us is to do exactly this. To choose to embrace this time, to rest, reevaluate, and restore ourselves.

Wintering is a balm from the frenetic space of an overworked mind and society, a book to curl up with and savor. "When everything is broken," May writes, "everything is also up for grabs. That’s the gift of winter: it’s irresistible. Change will happen in its wake, whether we like it or not." And when winter appears on our doorsteps, both mental and physical, we can choose to slam the door and ignore its persistence, or we can do as May prods us through example: Welcome it as the season it is, of survival, of rest, and, most of all, of renewal.

VERANDA SIP & READ BOOK CLUB FOR DECEMBER 2020



Selection: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May (available via local booksellers, Amazon, or Bookshop)
Start reading with us December 1.
Send Katherine your questions! December 19 and 20 via VERANDA's
Instagram Stories.
Tune in to our Instagram Stories as Katherine answers your questions about
Wintering on December 30.

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