It’s a cold, early morning when I glance up to see the sunshine glinting off the ice-clear, curved glass on the dome of this snow-globe place we live in, here amid these mighty and enchanting North Woods.

I’ve been outside taking in a few pensive moments for myself, while absorbing the relative silence, clean air and the oozing lonesomeness still dripping off the tree branches, leftover from the black, long night before.

I recall many icy mornings like these when I would walk eight blocks to school as an elementary school student. The streets and alleyways delineating those blocks provided several routes for me to travel to and from the big grammar school on the corner of North and First.

I remember all the street names displayed on the old, yellow metal signs at each corner, the look and variety of almost every individual house along the way — in many cases who lived there too — and, of course, all the kid shortcuts along the way.

Often, there would be grown-ups outside of the houses, brushing the snow off their running and warming vehicles or shoveling paths from the street or sidewalk to their front doors.

Sometimes, they would speak to kids passing; often, they didn’t.

The one thing I don’t remember from those walks is being cold. Maybe that’s because we wore a massive amount of winter clothes to go outside in those early times.

Once we got to school, it would take several minutes for all of us to get our jackets, sweaters, hats, snow pants, scarves, gloves and boots off and place or hang them neatly on hooks or racks in the cloakroom.

I can see classmate faces with red cheeks and runny noses, hair, static-charged from the hats we wore, misshapen and teased out of place by the electricity.

I pull four or five pieces of cut and dried maple logs off the wood pile and roll them up in my right arm to head back inside the house. The sun might be coming up, but its angle is low, and the temperature is down into the single digits.

The kitchen gets drafty when it’s like this.

With the door closing behind me, I use the toe of one of my boots to push on the heel of the other. The boot slips off my foot and slides onto the floor, shortly followed by the other.

I walk through house making my way to the fireplace in the living room. I unroll my arm with the wood and let it slide off onto a ledge along the opening to the fireplace.

After just a few minutes, the fire I’ve lit starts to crackle and produce smoke that twirls slowly as it rises before it moves faster up the chimney and then disperses slowly in the icy air above the house.

Before I went to school as a young boy, I would look out one of the back windows to see if there was chimney smoke lying flat across the sky, barely moving. If it was, I knew that day would be one of the coldest.

Today is one of those days.

Another of these smokestack memories from wintertime of old is from the grocery store where my parents shopped when we were kids.

My mom and dad would go inside the store to no doubt make their trip faster and easier than bringing two or three or four kids — depending on the year — with them.

Instead, we waited outside in the car and were told to behave.

When it was just my sister and I, we used to watch the end of a smokestack from the grocery store’s box incinerator. When it was working hard, we could sometimes see flames reaching the grated-metal cap at the top of the chimney, where glowing embers might roll and sparkle into the dark sky.

We called this cap “the hat.”

The snow-packed streets of town at Christmastime would be filled with shoppers, especially on Thursday nights, when downtown stores were open late. The holiday twinkling and colorful lights on stores and homes were always cool to see and enjoy.

The holiday tree for the town was centrally located with a huge, live evergreen decorated every year with regular-sized lightbulbs of green, red, blue and yellow, with a star at the top.

The communities in the region had varied themes of decorations, which mostly would hang from light posts, sometimes with garland twirled around wrought-iron fencing or metal sign poles.

People decked out in winter clothes matching the forest green and red colors of the season shopped in quaint downtown stores for Christmas cards and gifts. There was a jewelry store, a drug store a five and dime store, clothing stores and more.

There were bellringers and carolers, people stopped to talk with friends or neighbors, with Christmas songs playing from at least one loudspeaker.

A look down Main Street, with the snow all around, looked just like one of the scenes found on the Christmas cards folks were shopping for.

Once the fire gets going good and strong, I make sure there is enough wood stacked nearby for an hour or so. Then, I head for the door again. I put my boots and winter jacket back on.

I grab the Jeep keys and go. I drive through the snowy streets, headed out of town for a place not too far away, a place I like to visit to gauge the relative progress of winter via the conditions present on one of my favorite rivers.

Today, the rays of the sunshine belie the icy cold of the winds here as I lean on the bridge rail. The water is still flowing, chattering something about the cold and the river and the winter.

Snow and ice have begun to stack up along the shorelines along both sides of the river. It will likely be a while before the river completely freezes over, if it ever does. There have been several winters when it hasn’t.

Downstream, there are deer tracks crisscrossing the snow and ice covering the river edges. A doe slowly walks from behind a handful of bare thornapple bushes and tag alders to brave the river ice.

She moves out to the open flowing water and sips a drink. With wispy cirrus ice clouds creating frosty streaks above her in the blue sky, the doe creates another Christmas card painting out of real life.

Another place, another time inside the snow globe.

In the surrounding bare-branched woodlands, there are gray and blue jays making scolding and taunting noises at each other. Ravens and crows tumble as they fly overhead toward much larger, steadier big white pines found farther downstream.

The black bears and many other creatures that live out here in the summertime have now gone into hibernation, slipped into torpor, like skunks, or have migrated south to places where the snows are fewer or don’t exist.

There is a secret within the snow globe towns.

There endures an inherent, though ambiguous, sadness that abides, even out here in these glorious woodlands – a sadness whose origin is hard to determine or be certain of, but it is no less palpable.

Perhaps it’s difficult to label because it depends on the person, the place, the time.

I think it may be borne out of the nature of human existence and experience, which is never accomplished without loss, heartache and dark and desperate hours, some collective, most personal.

However, despite these things, people in snow-globe towns tend to keep a smile or two hidden away someplace, especially during the holiday times, even when somebody decides to palm and shake the snow globe.

“Hey, watch this,” they say.

I think that is part of the silent resolution of how things go here, along with other tenets of the often unspoken – like working hard, being honest, lending a helping hand, seeking truth and doing the best you can.

My Jeep heads back across the hard-packed snow on the dirt road I drove in on. I watch the jack-pine forests around me for signs of animal life but don’t see anything but more deer tracks along the edges of the road.

I think about how this year has flown past me, leaving my head spinning. It feels like I never got on solid ground this year, I was always behind how fast the days were blowing behind me.

I hope I’ll be able to catch my breath over the next couple of weeks as the year dies out, slow down long enough to get geared up to start all over again.

By the time I get home, the sun is already starting to descend toward the horizon, soon to welcome in the longest night of the year — the winter solstice.

I shut off the car and I sense a collective sigh from all of nature and humanity living in snow-globe towns across the world.

May the light of the world shine on everyone, everywhere, sometime soon.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.