“The world you were born in no longer exists.” A now common phrase spoken with weary certainty, heavy with both nostalgia and resignation. It is said when people watch their hometown haunts replaced by parking lots, when the pace of life has quickened beyond what they feel they can keep up with, or when they simply want to invoke rage in you to sell you something. It is more often than not an earnest lament, a quiet surrender to the march of time, to modernity. The old familiar world is gone. Lately, as the snow stubbornly endures in the fields and forests, as the drifts blocking rarely-used doors show no signs of melting, it is easy to believe that winter will never release its grip. The season stretches long, so too obscuring the familiar world beneath its weight. Just as the seasons turn however, just as the cold will eventually yield to that good green pattern beneath the soil, the world we are told is lost is never truly gone. It too waits beneath the surface, patient and enduring, ready to be reclaimed.
Winter has a way of making everything terrible feel permanent, absolute, unending. When the snow first falls, it is a welcome invitation—a soft and welcome hush, a gentle reshaping of the landscape into something quiet, new, and good. It even mercifully obscures our mistakes and errors. When it lingers though, when the accumulation outstays its welcome, the delight turns to a sort of Sisyphean frustration; we shovel paths that vanish overnight, clear roofs only to watch more layers of white settle, constantly defend the animals and homestead from winter’s fang. When there is so much snow still present in March, it becomes an unyielding reality that must simply be endured. Yet, even here in the long tail of winter, there are signs of movement—both plant and animal—signs of the good that lies beneath. The osier dogwood pulsing red amid the dirty snowbanks insists that change is coming. The chickens, emboldened by a shoveled path and frozen crust, step cautiously toward the compost pile, and the bees begin to stir. The world has not stopped, even if it feels that way. It, like all good things, is on the move.
If you accept in despair that the world of your childhood no longer exists, you will live as if that is true. You will accept the loss of the traditions you loved, the pace of life you cherished, the simple joys you assumed were swept away by the neon tide of modernity. The truth is though that much of what we think is gone has simply been abandoned, abdicated, left to be dusted over like a field with snow. The way forward is not to mourn what has been buried with gnashed teeth, but to uncover it, to step up and reclaim it, to return. If you miss the kindness of a small-town community, be the neighbor who waves, who stops to chat, who shovels another’s driveway unasked. If you resent the freedoms you have lost, break the law, renounce society, or run for office. If you long for the traditions of your youth, bring them back—light the bonfire, tell the stories, teach the prayers, bake the bread, invite people in. You live in a wounded world—yes—but it is not dead, gone, or vanished. It merely awaits for you to choose it again, it awaits its resurrection at your hand.
Spring will come, but it never arrives all at once. It will appear in small victories—a patch of the garden melted into mud, the good rot scent of thawing soil, the first morning you step outside and realize the air no longer bites. In the same way, the world we miss returns in pieces, in moments we choose to reclaim. The stories we tell our children shape their understanding of what is worth preserving. The work we put into our homes, our communities, our traditions—these are the paths through the snow that lead the way toward spring. Change in the world is inevitable, but it does not have to be a force that simply happens to us. We are part of it, we shape it, and—if we choose to—we can carve the paths back to the world we love.
Let the snow fall. Let winter stretch on a bit longer than expected. Let the world tell us, again and again, that what was is no longer, that the good things are lost.
Let us refuse to believe it.
The world we love is not lost. It is simply waiting for us to step forward, to carve out the spaces for which we long, to warm them back to life with our presence, our effort, our will. The frost will break, the thaw will come, and beneath it all, the world we thought was gone will be there, just as it always was, ready to be reclaimed and live again.
Let’s reclaim all the good green things together.
