“Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house?” ― Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises

 "The days begin white and glittering with snow---on the roof, the branches of the sycamore, where a robin has taken up residence. It reminds Kate of Robin Redbreast from The Secret Garden---for so many years, her only safe portal to the natural world. Only now does she truly understand her favorite passage, memorized since childhood:

"Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So, it must be all around us."

Often, before she leaves for work, she stands outside to watch the sun catch on the white-frosted plants, searching for the robin's red breast. A spot of color against the stark morning. Sometimes, while she watches it flutter, she feels a tugging inside her womb, as if her daughter is responding to its song, anxious to breach the membrane between her mother's body and the outside world.

The robin is not alone in the garden. Starlings skip over the snow, the winter sun varnishing their necks. At the front of the cottage, fieldfares---distinctive with their tawny feathers---chatter in the hedgerows. And of course, crows. So many that they form their own dark canopy of the sycamore, hooded figures watching.”

― Emilia Hart, Weyward