The first house I ever owned was situated on that most coveted variety of Pittsburgh-area lots: wooded and (almost) level.

Behind my home stretched a gently sloping forest of deciduous trees like maple, elm and dogwood. In the spring, I would watch eagerly as their branches sprouted tiny, tight buds that exploded into pink and white blossoms, harbingers of warmer weather. Soon after, the petals drifted away and were replaced by verdant leaves that filtered beams of summer sunlight onto the forest floor.

Then autumn came to ignite the trees with blazing color before scattering their leaves like red and gold parachutes to the ground below. For eight months of the year, the woods behind my house teemed with movement and sound. But inevitably in mid-November the landscape assumed a post-apocalyptic pallor as nature's pigment drained into damp brown earth, naked black branches and bland gray sky.

The world settled into a dreary stillness, and the only sign of life came in the form of the ubiquitous Western Pennsylvania deer. They would nuzzle through the snow and mud searching for sustenance in my back yard, growing thinner as the winter dragged on.

Before I lived in that lovely home on the wooded lot, my experience with deer was generally limited to swerving in avoidance as they hurtled their bodies into the path of my oncoming car. Occasionally I would encounter the silent beasts while I was hiking, but they typically fled as soon as I paused to observe them, white tails flashing a warning to the rest of the herd.

As a child I'd always wondered where the deer went when they needed to sleep, and I would worry about them freezing to death in the winter. Squirrels hunkered down in hollow trees, bears hibernated in their caves, birds flew south, but deer struck me as utterly defenseless against the brutality of Mother Nature.

It wasn't until that last frigid winter enshrouded my homestead that I was able to appreciate the usually frantic and often tragic deer in their peaceful repose. Finally I learned where they sought refuge in the bone-chilling night. Apparently every last one of them, unbeknownst to me, had been holding slumber parties in the woods behind my house all the years I'd lived there.

It was a bitter January morning when I first noticed the sleeping deer. I was moving about my kitchen, sipping coffee and steeling myself to face the day ahead. The moon had not set yet, and its fullness illuminated the silhouette of the trees and the snow blanketing my back yard.

I stopped to peer through the window at the icy pre-dawn desolation outside when some large shadows on the ground caught my eye. I squinted to identify the darkened shapes but failed. Intrigued, I pulled up a chair and sat by the picture window in my dining room, nursing my coffee and waiting patiently for the first red rays of sun to bleed across the sky.

As the light grew so did my recognition of the forms on the ground. I saw more than a dozen deer sleeping in the snow, their spindly legs tucked beneath them, their breaths puffing into the cold air. Even while they slept they held their heads aloft, ever alert to the possibility of danger.

Over the next half hour they gradually stirred, shaking off the cold as they rose to their feet, leaving holes in the snow where their warm bulk had melted through. I observed with reverence this gentle waking ritual, feeling like I had just discovered a secret lair for which I'd searched since childhood.

I have never been a morning person, but over the ensuing months the glimpse of those animals rising with the sun was sometimes the only good part of my day.

It's been a long time since I've gazed in wonder at the deer stirring in the frigid dawn. My home on the wooded lot doesn't belong to me anymore; it became just another casualty of my divorce. My marriage disintegrated over the course of that seemingly endless winter, and I awoke most mornings with a heart as barren and bleak as the view from my window.

But after so many lonely nights I somehow found comfort in the sight of deer awakening from their snowy slumber. It's a rare memory from that period that I still treasure, a reminder to this day that there is life, even warmth, in the dead of winter.

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