My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche, his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of the Erie.

The passage renders a father’s emotional climate as literal weather: “winter” settles into his face, turning ordinary features into a stark landscape of snow, bare branches, and frozen water. The imagery suggests not only age or fatigue but a habitual severity—coldness, restraint, and the threat of sudden violence (“cliff of snow threatening to avalanche”). By translating a parent’s mood into a natural scene, the speaker conveys how a child reads authority and danger in minute facial changes, and how domestic life can feel governed by seasons beyond one’s control. The Erie reference enlarges the father into something vast and impersonal, implying distance and power as much as beauty.