There is a chest in the kitchen that holds winter inside it all the year round.
I put my hand within and the cold bites, same as the cold of January that kills the old and the newborn lambs. But here it is tame. Here it is kept in a box the height of a man, humming low like a hive, and no one fears it. My whole life we have chased the cold and starved for want of holding it. We salt the pork and pray the meat lasts to Lent. We bury the roots. We watch the milk turn by noon in summer and there is naught to be done. Half of what a woman does from dawn to dark is a war against rot, and mostly she loses.
This box wins. It wins without a fight. Meat sits red and sweet in it for days. Milk stays milk. There is a whole shelf of eggs and none of them wanted for. No one thanks God for it. They open it, stare inside, close it, open it again a breath later as though the winter might have birthed some new thing while their back was turned.
I do not see how the cold is made. There is no ice hauled from any pond, no cellar dug, no snow packed in straw. It simply is cold, always, and asks nothing. That is the part my heart mistrusts. Every good thing I have known was paid for in sweat or blood or a long hunger.
A man who never fears the rot will forget to thank the harvest. God keep him when the humming stops.