One exception to the unremitting cold in Wharton’s Ethan Frome is a summer church picnic when Ethan and Mattie Silver first feel love for one another.
When Mattie is forced to leave, Frome drives her to the train station. Along the way, they stop by the frozen Shadow Pond and look out on the frozen landscape dumbly until Frome sees a “fallen tree-trunk half submerged in the snow, a symbol of Frome and Mattie’s half-fulfilled love for each other.
Sadly, the tree trunk triggers a happy memory of the previous summer when Frome sought out Mattie at the church picnic. “That’s where we sat at the picnic,” he reminded her. Frome refused a direct invitation to attend the picnic with Mattie. But he was cutting timber nearby, and a group of picnickers brought him to the lake where Mattie “was brewing coffee over a gypsy fire.” When Mattie sees Frome, she comes forward to greet him, and they sit together on the tree trunk. The moment was innocent, but Frome and Mattie were suddenly happy, a realization Wharton suggests akin to having “surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.” Frome recalls that Mattie wore a pink hat, * and at that, they both realize, standing there in the cold, that they are flirting. “They had never before avowed their inclination so openly, and Ethan, for a moment, had the illusion that he was a free man, wooing the girl he meant to marry.”
The recollection is fleeting, Mattie reminds him that they must be going, and they implicitly plan a double suicide; Frome will smash the sled into the great elm at the base of the hill. Like everything else in Frome’s life, the plan fails.
*At another picnic in Wharton’s Summer, Charity Royal wears a pink calico dress.
See Edith Wharton. Ethan Frome. Scribner’s: New York, 1911