It is Oct. 1 as I write this column. The first hard frost hasn’t as yet arrived. But it won’t be long coming — probably by the 10th of the month or a little later.

The first hard frost serves, in my opinion, as a given year’s most distinctive dividing line. It’s hard to pinpoint just when winter becomes spring, when spring become summer, or when summer becomes fall. But the winter season has essentially arrived, for me, when the first hard frost appears.

Like summer dew, frosts occur on clear, windless nights as temperatures cool and the air can’t hold as much moisture as it did during daylight hours. In summer and early fall, this excess moisture condenses on the surfaces of weeds, spider webs, metal tools, and other exposed objects. But when the temperature falls below 32 degrees, the same vapor crystallizes, forming frost.

Through a process known as sublimation, the vapor does not turn first into water and then freeze. Instead, it changes directly from the gaseous state into a crystalline form. As more and more vapor freezes, delicate featherlike patterns are formed. These are most noticeable when traced on windowpanes that glisten in the glow of a lantern at night or in the early morning sunlight.

Like frost and dew, fog is the product of saturated air. So long as the tiny droplets in a fog can move unheeded through below-freezing air, they remain super-cooled and unfrozen. Rime frost occurs when the droplets encounter tree limbs or other objects that cause them to crystallize instantly and coat the object with granular tufts of ice. Black frost of the sort that often occurs on highways is the most dangerous variety since it isn’t accompanied by rime and can’t be seen by motorists until it’s too late.

These are scientific explanations for frost and the arrival of the winter season. But frost is also a spiritual element.

From the time of the first hard frost until the winter slush arrives in mid-January, is my favorite time of the year. I like to walk down the creek below our home when the pale winter daylight is giving way to evening shadows. The water in the creek swirls darkly in the faint light. The sounds the water makes as it cascades over several small waterfalls are more distinct in winter. They speak to me quite clearly, lifting my spirits.

For 30 years now, my wife, Elizabeth, and I have during the winter months cooked and heated with wood. During the warmer months, we cook with a gas stove or grill. But we relish the time each year when we crank up our wood-burning cook stove. Through the years, we’ve had three of them.

In the mid-1990s, we upgraded to a Waterford Stanley, a stove manufactured in Ireland. Compact, with a white porcelain finish and black cast-iron trim, it’s easily the most handsome item in our home. The stove’s firebox is airtight. Heat can be directed via a damper directly toward the chimney flue or diverted into the oven, where desired baking temperatures can be maintained for hours. We mostly cook, however, directly on the top surface.

Cooking with a wood-burning stove bears no relationship whatsoever to cooking on electric or gas burners. With a wood-burner, you have to slow down and get in “a cookin’ frame of mind.” It’s sort of like flying by the seat of your pants. There are no automatic controls. You use your sixth sense when deciding whether or not to slide a pot or pan this way or that. The food cooks longer and slower. When done, it tastes better because you’ve paid closer attention to what you’re doing. You’ve put more of yourself into it. Also, there’s time to talk or think things over while cooking at this pace. Most of our family and professional decisions are made while cooking.

These spiritual aspects of frost and winter were what the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge focused upon in his poem “Frost at Midnight” almost two centuries ago. The 74-line poem is too long to quote in full. But it concludes with these lines, which were addressed to his infant son:

“ ... whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet moon.”

Winter can be grim, of course, but it is in many regards the sweetest season of all. It’s the time when we see most clearly and feel most keenly. As Coleridge so aptly noted, it’s the invigorating season that’s ushered in via “the secret ministry of frost.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.