The dark months

In the middle of January in Duluth the sun comes up close to eight and is gone again before five. You go to work in the dark and come home in it, and the daylight in between is low and white and comes in sideways, as if it's only passing through.

I'd braced for the cold. I hadn't braced for the dark. This is my second winter back, and it's the dark I notice this time, maybe because I spend so much of it in one room above a print shop with a lamp on.

We've been working long hours. Before long we're going to let a few people try the game, which is all I'll say about it, and the weeks before you let anyone in are the weeks you find everything that's wrong. So the lamp is on most nights later than I'd tell my mother, and Owen and I eat supper out of paper bags at our desks, and the radiators knock, and by half past five the windows have gone black and give me back my own face.

There are good things about the dark months, and I'm trying to keep a list. On cold mornings the lake smokes. The water is warmer than the air, so a mist rises off it in columns and drifts along the shore, and with the sun coming up behind it, it looks like the whole lake is quietly on fire. The snow makes the streets so quiet you can hear a car three blocks away. Everyone in the grocery store is kind to each other in a way that seems to come from having survived something together. And my mother, who would never say she's worried about me, has started leaving soup in my car.

The days are getting longer. A minute or two each day, which doesn't sound like much until you notice it's still light at five o'clock and stand in the street looking at it, like a fool.

How do you get through the dark part of the year?