Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Winter Quotes from Gatlinburg, Tennessee (The Great Smoky Mountains)

 When you imagine the raw tenacity & endurance that 19th Century settlers had while surviving some harsh winters in the mountains, you give credit to their human spirit.  There is amazing beauty to winter storms, and their aftermath.  While driving through Cades Cove, you can see the cabins of a time long ago before rollercoasters, unwelcome billboards, timeshare peddlers, and golden arched burger joints have laid stake to our East Tennessee community.  This was a time when family bonded for warmth and distraction, fires endured for food preparation and pre-bedtime stories, and families prayed for a short winter.  Short winters meant the food rations would last and pneumonia would stave off.  Sometimes, its the new batch of log cabins that cluster these Smoky Mountains that can bring families together and let the experience the beauty of winter.  Its these experiences and memories that allow folks to respect Winter, while anticipating Spring.

Quotes that depict Winter & all that it bring us each year:

Winter is nature's way of saying, "Up yours."  ~Robert Byrne

There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you.... In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.  ~Ruth Stout

"When the bold branches
Bid farewell to rainbow leaves -
Welcome wool sweaters.
~B. Cybrill

Every winter,
When the great sun has turned his face away,
The earth goes down into a vale of grief,
And fasts, and weeps, and shrouds herself in sables,
Leaving her wedding-garlands to decay -
Then leaps in spring to his returning kisses.
~Charles Kingsley



Winter came down to our home one night
Quietly pirouetting in on silvery-toed slippers of snow,
And we, we were children once again.
~Bill Morgan, Jr.

Spring, summer, and fall fill us with hope; winter alone reminds us of the human condition.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

The color of springtime is in the flowers, the color of winter is in the imagination.  ~Terri Guillemets

Brew me a cup for a winter's night.
For the wind howls loud and the furies fight;
Spice it with love and stir it with care,
And I'll toast our bright eyes,
my sweetheart fair.
~Minna Thomas Antrim

Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories.  ~From the movie An Affair to Remember

Of winter's lifeless world each tree
Now seems a perfect part;
Yet each one holds summer's secret
Deep down within its heart.
~Charles G. Stater

Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire:  it is the time for home.  ~Edith Sitwell


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