Wintering with tenderness through midlife joint pain
Difficult seasons rarely announce themselves as meaningful while they are happening. May combines memoir, nature, cold, hibernation, and cultural rituals to describe periods when illness, grief, exhaustion, or change require withdrawal and slower time. Joint pain can make ordinary movement and productivity less available, increasing the temptation to judge rest as failure. As midlife reshapes familiar assumptions, the book offers a gentler interpretation: reduced capacity may call for adaptation, warmth, support, and attention rather than denial. Wintering is not surrender or permanent retreat; it is the work of living through a season without demanding that the body and mind behave as though it were summer.
About Katherine May
Katherine May received an autism diagnosis in midlife after years of feeling out of step, and her own period of illness and family strain shaped Wintering. Her writing treats withdrawal not as weakness, but as knowledge learned through lived necessity.
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