BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… THE WINTER, LATE. “Do you ever have memories that are not quite your own? Moments in the mind’s eye that feel so real, but have never been a part of your own past?”
The house still stands on the hill and it is late winter but the air is strange and warm. Family gathers on the front porch — a wide, old, wrap-around porch — brothers, uncles, fathers, grandfathers, shadows strange in the harsh open glow of the old incandescent bulb screwed in as a porch light. Aluminum siding is cold and white, the porch strewn with the debris of life — canning jars, rusted exercise equipment, an abandoned dirt bike. The conversation turns to Easter plans as, down the way, a mist rises from the eastern creek, a creek obscured by scrubby trees. One of the big boys is using the worn out bench press, pushing two plates, then three. A boy, thin and lonely, watches on. Somewhere in the greening pastures, a woodcock calls, its thick buzzing song strange. Someone else’s memories.
Spring peepers have already begun calling, the frog song thick in the dark shallows, a fecund song, a reminder that the cold of winter is nearly done. Never mind the meteorology of it all, never mind the internet access, the 24/7 news coverage, and the overwhelming noise calling us to our mundane, superficial, materialist, and commercial lives. Beneath and beyond all that there is ancient magic at work, over and again, magic in the delicate white snow bursts of the sarvisberry blossom, of purple redbud clouds on the steep hill, and the orange blush of life at end of day. The earth is breathing again. You can smell the cold dirt exhale, feel the life moving in the chill, life waiting to burst forth, inexplicably, particularly when we aren’t watching.
Threshold space is special, a strange crossroads of time and place, challenging, welcoming, calling, frightening. At the crossroads, anything can happen.
The winter sky is a special kind of cyan as night falls, the color a cold gray-green blue like smooth ocean stone; a sky that stretches on forever over the hills. Next to the old blacktop road, the valley also stretches out, a valley wide like a dented pan, the forest a gauzy gray, faint hints of dusty pink in the end of light. Last shade of a western sun is a strange ghost through the cedar trees and it is a special kind of moment. Real magic like this remains mostly unnoticed. Tomorrow that same sun will swell the eastern horizon, cold promise of another day and another life and another trek across the sky.
This Winter’s Bone landscape echoes with memories, memories not my own. Are they ghosts? A lot of people don’t believe in ghosts. But choosing to ignore the real energies of the past is not heresy, not religious, just materialist. There’s a secularism in our modern dogmas. Humans long for meaning beyond the trite and commercial, even as we are trite and commercial. But there is comfort in the darkness, even as we fear that which we cannot see.
The last of the day’s wind unfurls the American flag over old #39, Mincy, Missouri’s one-room schoolhouse. I pause. The breeze is cold despite the afternoon’s now-lost heat. Schoolhouse and flag, framed again through camera lens. It’s the shot I want, the shot I’ve been contemplating, the shot I need. Every new photograph is built from the experience of the last and there have been thousands of photos before this one. Will this photo say what I need it to say? Will it be the one I need for the upcoming magazine? I can only hope, but take a dozen more just to be safe. The flag unfurls again and again in the breeze and far beyond this little square of land in the Ozarks? Stratospheric clouds make patterns like that of saltwater ocean sands, far away. Echoes throughout the natural world are everywhere.
The bards of old told the people’s stories and, in so doing, saved the past again and again. Legends, myths, histories, a lens through which to view ourselves. A sacred duty, this bard thing; the songs of the heart in prose and spoken word. “Poetry” is now rarefied, the realm of wannabe post-modern beatniks and people with too much time on their hands. But our stories? Our moments? Such things should not be left to the experts or the academics. Real life is best told by everyday people, but people still willing to see the magic not where such is easy, but instead where magic is overlooked: the enchanted amidst the everyday.
For until we can see — as good stewards of life — the magic in the mundane, it is likely we will never be able to see any magic at all. And that would be a sad life to live indeed, a sad life to leave to the next generation and the next after that. To be unable to see the extraordinary, in another’s memories, in the world simply one step removed from the responsibilities of everyday life, and even that of a single series of moments, as dusk turns to night, as Saturn sets, as the western stars blink back into existence, again, today, tonight, always, of this long winter, late.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2026
