There’s a specific kind of dark that settles over this town starting sometime in November and doesn’t really lift until March, and it’s not just early sunset, it’s the lake effect cloud cover that means even the daylight hours often don’t get properly bright. I moved here for the job, not the winters, and I want to be honest that the winters were a genuine surprise even though everyone who’s lived here for more than a season warned me. “Ithaca is gorges” is the tourism slogan, cute pun, and it’s true, the gorges are stunning, but by January half of them are closed off because the ice makes the trails genuinely dangerous, and the ones that stay open turn into these frozen, silent corridors that feel like walking through a different planet than the one you were on in October.

My reading chair has a whole winter migration pattern at this point. It lives by the window from spring through fall, decent light, view of the street. Once the radiators start working overtime in November it slides about six feet across the living room to sit directly next to the one that actually puts out real heat, my apartment building has three others that are mostly decorative, and I’ve made my peace with reading under a blanket with a space heater humming instead of natural light for a solid four months a year. There’s something almost monastic about it that I’ve come to genuinely like, even though I complain about it every single year to anyone who’ll listen.

What surprised me most, coming from a milder climate, is how much winter actually helps the reading habit rather than hurting it. Nobody wants to go anywhere. The gorge trails you’d normally hike after work are closed or treacherous, the farmers market shuts down until May, and so the appeal of just staying in that one warm corner with a book and the blanket becomes close to irresistible on a Tuesday when it’s eleven degrees out and getting dark at four thirty. I got through more books my first Ithaca winter than any year before it, almost by accident, because there was genuinely less else worth doing after dark.

The thaw, when it finally comes, always catches me off guard. Some day in March the gorge trail signs come back down, the ice starts cracking audibly if you’re near the falls, and my chair starts its slow migration back to the window like it’s following the sun on a very long, very patient schedule. I miss the cave-like winter reading corner for about a week before I remember I can see the actual sky again, and then I don’t miss it at all until November circles back around.