Winterwee.

Like me, Eva Meijer is missing winter ...

After a few years of looking and walking, my body learned to read in the days when the evenings will be busy and this has changed my experience of spring. Being attentive to the right conditions connected me differently to the multispecies community in which I live, and to the change from winter to spring.

Traces of care.

Language can also help us care for what disappears. I call the longing for winter winterwee in Dutch, a word that stems from heimwee, homesickness. I can capture what is gone in words and write about the frost flowers on the window of my childhood bedroom, skating on the slootjes that connect the meadows in Noord-Holland, or the stories my mother told, about cars driving over the IJsselmeer, the lake on which the town of Hoorn where I was born is located. Stories about others, such as nonhuman animals and their agency in finding new ways to live, can be the beginning of new narratives. We can all learn to read our environment better, through words, our bodies, new practices.