“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.”

Why is it great? A few weeks ago I went to an exhibit of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings in Seattle (a strange experience for someone who lives half an hour from the places he painted in Maine), and I was struck by the poetry of his observations in the notes next to the artworks. Like this one, about a tattered lace curtain blowing in the breeze: “Decades of wind and incoming fog had shredded the delicate lace, and now it moved like a ghost from the house’s past.” The same poetry fills this observation about winter: “The bone structure of the landscape” is so visceral and evocative. But it’s the last line — “Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.” — that really moves me. It’s both sinister, suggesting that something unseen lurks below, and hopeful, reminding us that spring will come.