The solstice walk was almost not a walk. The forecast had been wrong all week and by Sunday afternoon the gray had thickened into the kind of low ceiling that does not look like weather, exactly, but makes you not want to go anywhere. I was on the couch with a book and the dog was asleep on my foot and there was a small fire going. I had a perfectly good excuse to skip it.

I went anyway. Not out of discipline. Out of a quieter sense that the shortest day of the year deserves at least a short walk, and that if I missed it I would notice the lack later, in the way that small omissions in December stack up by February into a feeling of having let the season pass without paying attention.

A Half Mile of Familiar Trail

The trail behind the house is not much. A half mile of mowed path through a power line cut, then a loop through a small woods, then back along the road. I have walked it hundreds of times. It is the kind of walk I do not think about while doing it, because there is nothing on it I have not seen, which is also the reason it works. You go on a walk like this not to discover anything but to give the day a shape it would not otherwise have.

The light at four in the afternoon on the solstice has a particular color. Not gold, not really. More like very weak tea, held up to a north window. The trunks of the birches were almost white against it and the trail was the color of wet cardboard. There was no wind. I could hear the highway from a long way off, which I have learned means a temperature inversion is sitting over the valley, and I could hear a single crow somewhere ahead of me, calling and then not calling and then calling again.

The Light at Four in the Afternoon

I saw two birds the whole walk. A downy woodpecker, working a dead branch, and a small bird that flew across the path too fast for me to identify, low and brown, a sparrow probably. That is not many. On a summer walk this same loop would have given me twenty species without trying. But the solstice walk is not for seeing birds. It is for being out in the light such as it is, on the day when the light is at its weakest, and feeling whatever you feel about that.

What I feel about it has changed over the years. When I was younger I thought of the solstice as a kind of bottom, the dark trough, and the walk was a way of acknowledging it before turning toward the longer days. I still feel some of that. But I have come to feel something else more strongly, which is that the short day is also a still day, the year holding its breath at its lowest point, and there is a particular quiet in the woods on December 21 that you do not get any other afternoon. It is worth a walk to be there for it.

I came back inside an hour later. The fire had not gone out. The dog had taken over the couch entirely. I made tea and watched the last of the light go, which on this day happens around 4:35 and is over very quickly. The whole afternoon had a shape now. The walk had given it one.

A Walk Gives the Afternoon Shape

If you are skeptical about ritual walks, I would not call this one. It is not a tradition I observe formally. I just know that if I skip it I miss something, and so I do not skip it. Other small habits work the same way. They do not announce themselves. They just quietly hold the year together at the seams.

The light came back the next day. It always does. From here the days will lengthen by a few seconds, then a few minutes, then by the time February arrives we will be gaining nearly two minutes a day. The arithmetic of it is comforting. The walk is comforting too. Together they make for one good afternoon in a long stretch of dark ones, and one is enough to mark the turn.