Awakened to the Fallen Snow

We need the winter to bring the spring

I remember the phone call quite clearly.

“It’s time, and you’ve got to come as soon as you can.” My sister’s words from 500 miles away inside the home where my father was dying, immobile in a hospice bed inside the old Cape Cod on Vernon Avenue, the same street where he grew up.

It was late February. The weather was windy, snowy, and I had a long drive ahead. I left Chicago that afternoon for Pittsburgh and through squalls of snow and whiteouts, along four-lane highways that had become nearly one lane, I drove through the night. The storm wasn’t going to stop me. It wasn’t going to keep me from my final moments with my father. I cursed my way through the rough weather for nearly 10 hours, a drive that usually took seven.

On the morning of the first day of spring 2025, I awaken to nearly two inches of snow. One of those late March storms in the Midwest that sneaks up on you. One day it’s 65 degrees; the next it’s 30 and snowing. In the early hours at the kitchen window, the thick clouds had been silver, the snow blanketed the yard and hung like cake icing from tree limbs. In due time, the sun broke through and with the assistance of its trajectory, it warmed the world, water from melting snow dripped from my home’s roof to the ground. And in the garden out front, the stems of tulips, which had emerged in recent warmer days, now stretch out from this fresh white blanket, as if rejecting and defying what nature had unexpectedly produced.

We need the winter, of course. In whatever form it comes to you in your place in the world. We need the shift in the natural lifecycle, the colder air, the moisture. We need it to offer in spring. Winter must be so that it can permit life for a new season.

I wonder now as I look out from my window if all winters are the precursors to new life, new chances, new beginnings. Not just seasonal winters, but the winters of hardship, emotional winters, cultural winters. Is every winter in some way our “winter of discontent?” Steinbeck’s novel—The Winter of Our Discontent—centers around spiritual crisis, displacement, immigration, morality, integrity, and the faded American dream, the kind of crises that envelopes us today. Right now, we are living in the winter of our discontent, in the middle of a storm that could send us into the ditch in the road, over a cliff, crashing into a roadside tree. Injustice, the lack of integrity, authoritarianism, a disregard for morals, ethics, and kindness have crept into our world like a cancer, like a relentless winter storm. And through it we can choose to either continue to drive, pull off the road and wait for it to pass, hide by the fire and pray for sun, or we travel far away to a land of white beaches and warm waters, leaving behind this terrible winter.

What will we do? What will I do?

If I had the means, the guts, and no familial responsibilities, I might consider running. Yes, I have thought about leaving America and heading to Ireland, Spain, or Portugal. These are not idle thoughts, but they are unlikely deeds. So, have I decided to ride out this storm? Have I decided to live with the discontent?

The sunlight now bounces off the windowpane and across the living room. The breeze blows melted snow from the magnolia branches. There’s a cardinal sitting along the fence. Winter—the actual calendar season or the perceived season—can be beautiful. The snow can be luminous. We need the winter, I tell myself again, to give us spring.

On that stormy February night more than twenty years ago, I made it to my parents’ home sometime after midnight. A single light could be seen through a window, and my mother had left the front porch lamp on. The snowfall had subsided, but the walkway was covered, so I stepped slowly toward the door and up the steps to the entranceway. My sister met me there.

“He’s still with us,” she said, smiling. “He’s asking for you.”

That night I sat on the bed beside my father, held him in my arms. He could only talk in brief moments and there were times his breath was so shallow it was difficult to understand him. But he knew I was there.

The next day, the weather turned warmer, unusually so for late February, the sun was out, and the snow was melting. And that night with much of the fallen snow gone, my father died in his bed.

That February, winter was still all around. There was more than a month remaining before the calendar would say otherwise. But my father’s “discontent” had ended. He was at peace, we all believed. And I had made it through the storm, the physical and emotional storm, acknowledging that despite the aches and pains of that winter, spring would come. Winter was necessary, inevitable, but not forever. Now, as I look out toward the fresh snowfall on this March day decades later, I can see spring. I know it’s out there, and I have to believe this dreadful winter couldn’t possibly be our eternal season of discontent.

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David W. Berner is the author of several books of award-winning fiction and memoir. His latest, Daylight Saving Time: The power of growing older is available now. His debut poetry collection, Garden Tools is due out in October 2025 from Finishing Line Press. His novella, American Moon will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2026.