For all the talk about fertile gardens and verdent views, my heart belongs in winter.

Since moving to Vermont two years ago, I have been through winter twice. True winter. Not the winter of the South, when snow would flirt with a few passing days and coats were always too warm; nor of the winters of my childhood, when there was enough snow to play and taste and to say, “It snowed.”

Winter in Vermont is a handfastness with folds of whites and grays, a gasp of blue-pink piercing cold that welcomes and bites, blinds with torrents of falling flakes and chills the air so clear that distant white mountains seem close enough to reach out a mittened hand and touch.

In the first winter here, my wide-eyed joy at the first snows was replaced by a deep love for the deeper grip of January, temperatures so cold they made the air smell like rainfall, the way living required a simple deliberateness, the early falling of darkness, dark coming, dark going, driving in falling flakes under tree branches heavy with the snow.

And while driving, I came to love two very different pieces of music that I heard while sheltered inside on nights so wintry that trees cracked open. Each made me jump up and run over to the radio to find out more.

Natalie Merchant’s cover of “Poor Wayfaring Stranger” has open chords that mimic the joining of barrenness and beauty of the snowy field I see on the way home from work, spread out before me and dotted with a single red barn.

Ola Gjeilo’s “Dark Night” plays on my morning drives in the heart of winter. It seems to light up the snow in swirls of cobalt and turquoise and glints of red, more luminiscent than my car’s headlights. It renders the icy inclemency thrilling.

I played the Gjeilo on the way home from work today, to remember, as summer has begun to relent. I yearn for iron-cold dark night again, and for snow.