It's Cold

By Jonathan Shipley

I’m writing these lines when it’s -8º outside. I just walked the marsh in the pre-dawn light. It was cold. Quite cold. Bundled up, though, I could make my way on the desolate trails: beneath the empty trees; alongside the frozen ponds; up the hillocks of prairies; down the frozen tumps; through the crystalline landscape towards the car; and back home.

And, as I write this (warm now in a sweater, cozy now on the sofa), I think of how cold things can be and how warmth comes in its many forms: hats, mittens, gloves, family, friends, love.

I walked the boardwalk at the marsh and, with each step, a rabbit popped out from beneath me and scampered into the snowy underbrush. One step, two step. Rabbit rabbit. Three step, four. Rabbit rabbit.

Cottontail rabbits don’t hibernate in winter. They simply get thicker coats. They don’t eat grasses as much, now buried in the snow, but bark and twigs to survive the cold. And it is cold. The windchill is -20º.

The coldest temperature ever recorded in Dane County was -38º degrees on February 3, 1996, the same day that the state record was set: -55º in Couderay. Once, in 1982, there was a windchill in Madison of -70º.

It’s cold, but it could be colder. The sun’s not yet out, but the tundra swans are. I hear them before I see them. In a majestic V against the bluing sky, they fly. They sing. Their song, perhaps, an admonishment toward me: go inside. Stay warm, fool. Be with those you care about.

Southbound, they fly. Migrating, they use the Upper Mississippi River Flyway on their way toward the East Coast to places including Chesapeake Bay. That bay, in this cold clime, seems a million miles away. The swans have far to go.

Swans form lifelong pair bonds. Next January, perhaps, as I walk this path, I’ll look up and see the same swans flying, flying, flying toward what’s next: sunrise, sunset, sunrise.

I write this as my hands warm, my heart warms. My wife is nearby, reading a book on witchcraft. “Did you know the Old English word ‘wicce’ and ‘wicca’ are often linked to the meanings ‘wise’ and ‘one who knows’? Witchcraft implies knowledge.” I know now, my bride. My daughter is with her best friend right now, getting matching tattoos. My other daughter is laughing with her boyfriend over coffee. I am always going to want to be in their warm embraces.

But now, it’s cold. But it could be colder—and snowier. Wisconsin State Climatology Office documents show that the record one-day snowfall in Dane County was 17.3 inches on December 3, 1990. In 2008, a record 40.4 inches of snow fell in the month of December. Just recently, on November 29, 2025, Madison saw the largest November snowfall in local history: 9.3 inches.

It was cold and quiet in the Marsh. The only sounds were the echoes of the far distant swans, my breath, the scrunch of snow beneath my boots. I kept walking and saw coyote scat, deer footprints, the busy tracks of small rodents, a cardinal taking wing —a shard of flame in an icy world.

What flame do you carry? And for whom? It’s the New Year and, yes, it’s cold, but we are all warmed by our flames.

“Life is a pure flame and we live by the invisible sun within us,” wrote philosopher Sir Thomas Browne. He did not visit Cherokee Marsh. But, if he did, he’d have seen that flame of cardinal, and those swans, and rodents, and rabbits, and people like you, and people like me, cold in the grip of Wisconsin’s January chill but all—everything and everyone—embraced in the brazen cold; embraced with something called love.