Winter picnics are few, and among the best is Elizabeth von Arnim’s on a freezing afternoon on a bluff above the Baltic.
On a brilliant January day, Elizabeth’s birthday, she travels about three hours in a horse-drawn carriage over deep snow to a bluff overlooking the cold and windless Baltic Sea. The sudden view of the sea surprised her coming out from the mossy, pine-covered forest. The dazzling yellow shoreline borders a blue sea with boats afloat with orange sails. Elizabeth and friends admire the view from the sleigh and then set up for the meal: “I warmed the soup in a little apparatus I have for such occasions,” she says, “which helped take the chilliness off the sandwiches –this is the only unpleasant part of the winter picnic, the clammy quality of the provisions just when you most long for something very hot.” There is humor as she confides, “It is the most difficult thing in the world to eat sandwiches with immense fur and woolen gloves on, and I think we ate almost as much fur as anything and choked exceedingly during the process.”
As the picnic ends, you get a sense of Elizabeth’s arch sense of humor: By the time we had finished, the sun was already low behind the trees, and the clouds beginning to flush faint pink. The old coachman was given sandwiches and soup, and while he led the horses up and down with one hand and held his lunch in the other, we packed up–or, rather to be correct, I packed, and the others looked on and gave me valuable advice.”
Featured Image: Simon Harmon Vedder. “But on a brilliant winter’s day, my conscience is as clear as the frosty air itself.” In Elizabeth von Arnim. Elizabeth and Her German Garden. London: 1906; Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/elizabethhergerm00elizuoft)
See Elizabeth von Arnim. Elizabeth and Her Garden. London: Macmillan & Co.1898.