For most of January I’ve been able to look out my office window and see a simplified, clarified world. Black and white. Horizontal and vertical. Stripped-down and still.

The only touches of color I see are the dark green of the bamboo fronds that grow up to my second-story window and the dusky red of the brick-front houses across the way.

“Take winter as you find him and he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow with no nonsense in him,” wrote James Russell Lowell. “And tolerating none in you, which is a great comfort in the long run.”

I don’t like cold weather, but I haven’t minded our recent spate of it. I’m reminded of the way I felt when I lived through winters in more northern climes, which was strengthened and turned inward, more attuned to the essentials of life.