Even in bitterest winter, I walk every day. A winter’s walk requires looking down a lot. Anxiously eyeing the icy bits, avoiding a slip and another broken wrist. On city sidewalks or park trails, my terrain is all sound and texture: huff, scrunch, shuush, shuush. And, of course, hearing the happy exertions of my children, as they take the tougher, slower route beside me. While I walk, they crawl. Whether across the snowdrifts or sinking knee deep into them, by choice they make every step a mountain climb. They have no worries in winter.

Winter’s low light keeps my eyelids heavy and my instincts hermitic. But I prod myself to get out and to look up. When I do, I am gifted with the delicate sight of tree boughs blown bare. Like dark lace curtains, they frame the dome of sky above me. Skeletal leaves and plump snowflakes churn the air. I am both grounded and suspended—like a figure in a snow globe.

I sometimes feel a wholly different person in winter, tense-muscled and brittle. At some point on my winter walks, at some point on icy drives, I have to remind my shoulders to drop, tell my back to unclench. Does that tension stem from the divergence between Earth’s orbit and the tilt of its axis? In January, we are at perihelion, our closest approach to the sun. Simultaneously, the Northern Hemisphere tilts to its greatest degree. The sun slouches on the horizon, straining to give warmth and light. Is this muscle memory I feel, of forty years of elliptical revolutions around the sun? Does my iron-rich blood feel the magnetic pull of the poles?

But I am freer breathing in winter. My lungs are loose. They open wide to the icy air, bronchi like tree branches. Last month, a large flock of robins roosted in a hackberry tree across the street from my house. It was startling to see these springtime birds on a below-zero day. But they fluffed their feathers and feasted heartily on shriveled berries. They were open to the opportunities of winter. Like these resourceful robins, can I let winter win me over?

In the weeks since I first noticed the robins, their numbers have only grown. On my walk to pick up the kids from the bus stop, I counted four trees worth of robins. I watched them pick hackberries, pinching them perfectly in their beaks like jewelers examining gemstones, and in two quick gulps, dropping them down their gullets. The robins were in a rhythm, fluttering and feeding their way down the block. Perhaps I blocked the wind for them a little, as they let me get very close to them as they queued on low branches. Close enough to see that the copper color of their red breasts ends before it reaches the feet. Their undercarriage is white, as if they’d been sitting in snowbanks like my children. Then the kids climbed off the school bus and, true to form, flew straight into high-piled snowbanks. They only had eyes for the white stuff until I told them to look up, to see our many robin neighbors.

I wanted them to marvel at these winter-adapted birds, but instead they giggled as robins rained berries and poop down on us. One missile hit my daughter’s jacket and left a turmeric-colored streak. I wondered how a desiccated black berry could travel a robin’s digestive track and still come out this color, but the children had no such high-brow thoughts. They had left me in their snowy wake as they plowed down the block, shouting “Poooooooop!” all the way.

My Minnesotan children were born to winter. Wind-chill factors, thundersnow and polar vortexes do not vex them. They are always game to go hiking on snow-packed paths. I let them roam far in front of me. Their voices ping crisply to my ears with no tree canopy to buffer them. I trail them, tracking boot steps, picking up stray mittens. Sometimes there’s a straggler or slowpoke to keep me company, but mostly they bound on ahead. Like fawns in their first winter of life, they’ve grown heavier now, 60 or 70 pounds, stronger, seasoned, losing their spotted coats.

As my seven-year-old son stepped off the bus one December afternoon, a ring of black crows swooped low above us. He gasped.

“Why do the crows fly together like that?”

“Because they’re very smart,” I said. “A predator might be after them—an owl or a hawk—and there’s strength in numbers.” The flock took refuge in a giant oak tree down the street, but they were noisy and unsettled. We craned our necks to spy the predator that pursued them but saw nothing.

Climbing a neighbor’s hillside for a better look at the crows, my son slipped, and his unclothed hands dug deep in the snowbank. He had forgotten his mittens back at school; his eyes ran over with tears from the shock of the cold. I gave him my black mitts and said we should head home. He gave one more backwards glance at the birds, then flew down the sidewalk, my crow-child, hands flapping in my floppy black mitts.

We have since noticed flocks of crows gathering in our neighborhood regularly. Sometimes they are right outside my daughter’s bedroom window. They like to form a communal roost in a tree two doors down. They are smart, sociable, gregarious until they settle in for the night, warmed up by each other’s bodies and the thermals rising from chimneys. Not so different from my kids huddled close together on a twin bed on a pitch-black winter’s night, telling each other tall tales, stilling their active minds for sleep.

By January, my kids are old pros at gearing up for the weather. Mornings flow faster. As my kindergartener dresses herself confidently in warm layers before slogging to the bus stop, I am reminded of the winter camping program I directed in northern Wisconsin for three years. A decade and a half has passed, but I think of it nearly every time I see young legs step into snow pants, or that slow stretch of suspenders onto shoulders.

In an eyeblink, under my watch, boys transformed from indoor creatures to winter campers. One moment they were warm, rowdy and well-fed in the bunkhouse, the next they were near-silent arctic explorers. They did make clumsy skiers though, looking like gangly storks or howdah-topped elephants. Their over-packed packs threatened to tip them over and their skinny ski poles looked like cheap chopsticks in their hands, not up to the job of supporting them. Lucky for them, snow is a forgiving surface on which to fall, and fall they did.

The camp ran every weekend of January and February, and sometimes in March if the snowpack held. Troops of boys and adult leaders pulled onto the camp’s rough snow-packed roads well after dark on a Friday, some traveling from as far as southern Illinois. I can only imagine the din and reek of the vans full of boys just let out of school, dank winter clothing and sweaty socks, a fast food dinner. The boys descended on the hot cocoa packets, cheese, crackers and peppery summer sausage like ravens on carrion. Ravenous. There was never enough food to sate them. And also, never enough bathrooms (a lesson not just of winter). The direct evidence confronted me every morning in the yellow sprinkled snowdrifts around the bunkhouse.

Before I became the director, I was a trail guide for two years. I remember taking one group of boys to camp in an archery range. Or at least that’s what it was in the summertime. In winter, the targets were stowed away. The remains of the hay bale backstops raked flat to cover autumn’s muddy trails. It was deep winter when we camped there, and the snow met my knee caps.

The range was a smooth porcelain cup of unbroken snow. It sheened milky blue in the noon sun. Big flat flakes fell. As fast as they fell, I was melting them in a pot for drinking water. We chose to camp here on the range instead of in a campsite which would have had a clanky cast iron pump for well water. There were boys all around me, and they were cracking the smooth expanse of snow with grain shovels.

The boys piled snow at the center of the range. Mountains grew with their efforts. Their voices quieted and then stopped, as the exertion of shoveling and stepping took their breath. They scraped their way from nothing to something.

That something was a quinzhee, a rudimentary snow shelter. The word and the shelter are Athabaskan in origin, from the Indigenous people of Alaska and northwest Canada. It was first documented in the English language in 1984, though I’m sure white people had adopted the native practice far earlier. It is a very smart shelter.

Once the boys had formed 6-foot-tall snow piles, they studded them with long sticks. That helped orient the diggers when they hollowed out the quinzhees, and made sure they didn’t bust right through the back wall. All afternoon, we let the snow rest, compacting and hardening in the sun. Then I hiked, while the boys shuffled on bulky cross-country skis or snowshoes. When the air temperature allowed it, I left my hands bare so I could tie boys’ bootlaces and adjust the bindings of their skis. I pinched the metal buckles, so the heat of my fingers melted the ice that sealed them shut.

I was melting snow and cooking lunch when chickadees landed on the picnic table. First there were two, then more and more alighted on the ice-crusted wood boards. They cocked their heads at me. Did they think my battered black pot was a bird bath? When I moved, they lifted off almost as one organism. When I was still, they fluttered back down, nearer to me. The hop of their feet was light but impatient. They were wild birds, but they seemed to know my pockets bulged with GORP—good ol’ raisins and peanuts.

After a hot lunch, it was time for the rough, wet work. Hollowing out the mound of snow called for spare mitts, raincoats and a regular rotation of diggers. No matter the outside temperature, the heat of bodies and breath melts the snow inside the growing hollow. We couldn’t risk wet gear and the resultant hypothermia. I watched the boys for the telltale signs of lowered body temp—stumble, mumble, fumble. But as long the boys were fed, hydrated and moving, I didn’t really worry.

Once the shelter was dug out, an icy crust naturally formed over the quinzhee, and the boys could line the inside with foam pads and sleeping bags. When darkness fell (so early in winter), I hiked them silently to warm their bodies and quiet their minds for bed. We took no lights, navigated by moonlight bouncing on snow. With heated cores and tired legs, the scouts split up, six to eight sleepers per quinzhee. The buddy system kept everyone safe. No one alone—save for me. After turning down the gas lantern as low as I could, I made my bed. I emptied the 8-foot-long heavy plastic pack sled of any remaining gear, and lined it with foam pads. I slept within it, in the open air, cinching my mummy bag tight to my face. But I left my glasses on. So many stars to see. Our galaxy like a glass of milk, spilling down to me, below in the snow.

I felt then, as I do now, a tension with winter. I struggle with it but I am drawn to it. Marveling at the wide-open winter sky, even as its winds chap my face. Though my ice cube toes protest, I tie tight my broken-in pac boots every morning and head outside. Baring my hands to the subzero air so I can truly touch the cold. These are my polarities. Like the Earth on which I walk, in winter I move closer to the sun in the sky, even as I tilt away from it. Winter is my magnet.

These elliptical revolutions bring me round to see my role hasn’t changed much in the years since I was a winter camping guide. At the end of autumn, just as I did at camp, I inventory our winter gear. Inhale the faint funk of wool felt boot liners. Patch knees on snow pants. Order more waterproof mitts. Like I did with my campers, I advise my children to dress in the fundamental layers of winter clothing: wicking, warmth, wind-and-waterproof. Long underwear pulls sweat away from your skin. A fleece jacket or wool sweater warms your core. A tough exterior keeps moisture and breezes from chilling you to the bone. In the cold, I tell my children to take care of their gear—and each other—and they listen.