Brown is the color of winter for a lot of reasons; count 'em

Winter is the color of a dog.

A brown dog.

It is the color of a pointing dog’s head and eyes both directed at you from his place on the cushion that your significant other purchased as an experiment because the dog is bigger now, and doesn’t chew as much when you’re not looking.

It lays there in the kitchen on the cushion because it’s cold outside and the days are short as the dog’s hair, and you find yourself spending too much time inside with the dog locked on your True North like a compass needle. Its eyes forebode a soft and passive aggression. If you leave this room, expect some heavy separation anxiety, they seem to warn. If you’re gone too long — two or three minutes — expect a rapturous whining that ends with a pile of Thermafill covering the floor like a February snow storm. FYI.

When the teak colored eyes in the nutbrown face close, you slip from the wooden stool at the kitchen bar. It is stained walnut and it creaks just as you lift your backside from the seat and the dog, accusingly, opens one brown eye, lets loose a very small weeping sound that sets you back down.

FYI.

Before you slide off the stool and tiptoe away, you must wait for the back leg, spotted brown with a rust-colored fetlock, to begin kicking as if the dog is swimming through a dream, you remind yourself.

You must proceed slowly, avoiding any nod to the hesitancy of Brownian motion.

Be slow and fluid.

So you sit on the kitchen stool studying the inside of your coffee cup because winter is the color of coffee too, isn’t it?

It is the color of the Peruvian, Colombian or Sumatran beans that make the coffee that fills the cup to its brown rim. And it is the color of the caddis fly painted on the cup, likely with a camel hair brush.

You must recognize a pattern to this.

Winter is the color of all that coffee poured in all those cafes, on all those mornings where laid-off construction and woods workers wearing brown Carhartts sip and chat, waiting for daylight, a hard freeze, or next spring’s break up.

Brown, too, is winter deer or elk against a backdrop of snow. The elk’s mane is brown as bark and when it moves, you raise your binoculars and watch it go.

Brown is the antler that, in a few weeks, the whitetail buck may have left in a snowless spot near a pine.

Ruffed grouse are brown and when they whirr through a lowland of alder, aspen or birch at your approach, wheeling into a gray sky that your breath dresses with a temporary veil, their chocolate brown body and wings plunge and wheel and dip. Then, just like that, they are gone into deep cover, a grove of cedar maybe, or a tannin-colored seam of dogwood and elderberry.

I had a pair of snowshoes made of rawhide. The leather glistened, the ash frames and toe board were a lighter brown. I no longer have them, but they once belonged to the pallet of winter. They were employed to huff over snow to a pond where muskrat and beaver lived, and maybe a mink sometimes, their pelts like cream stout when you blew on it with white breath to behold the guard hairs and underfur.

I remember a .22 pump rifle, a Remington Model 12, that I held and used to snap bullets at white paper targets. It was autumn. The sumac was red, and yellow leaves lay on the ground. Built in the 1930s, the small rifle was a veritable antique but still sharp and precise as decimals. Its wooden stock was smoothed by hands and shoulders, and by the warm tuck against woolen or denim jackets. The barrel was pock-marked with tiny brown spots. It would have been — and maybe was once — a good squirrel gun. When the first snow covered the hardwoods the critters came out on limbs and barked. Brown Sorel boots then, made tracks to the woods.

Ax handles and bark, tannins, elk hide and a bolt of tamarac in the wood stove. Those bear the color of the season. It is a good, warm brown.

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Ralph Bartholdt can be reached by email at rbartholdt@cdapress.com