My Winter with Edith Wharton
At the turn of the 20th century, novelist Edith Wharton built The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts; a vast, Italianate villa of more than 16,000 square feet, finished according to Wharton’s own characteristically rigorous theories of architectural and garden design. New Yorkers of the Golden Age would drift languidly to the Berkshires in summer, to escape the sweltering Manhattan heat. They came for just such grand estates of manicured lawns and formal gardens; for the clear air and breezes; they came for the lakes, and the woodland; for the tennis courts, and courting rituals.
I, by contrast, came to the Berkshires in January. The snow lay thick and undisturbed, muting the landscape like dustsheets in a home shut up for winter. Beneath it everything was and . Pfff, I said to myself, it’s always below zero in London. I was feeling jolly, testing the limits of the four-wheel drive, skidding merrily around treacherous corners overhung with snow-thickened elm and oak. Then I realized he meant that it was below zero Fahrenheit. I slowed the car out of respect. This was a cold too cold for my mild English comprehension. For three hours I had been snug in my rented Ford Explorer, a steaming New York coffee and a bag of donut Munchkins beside me. How was I to know it was polar, out there?
