Mid - Winter. Snow, freeze, sun, melt, rain, freeze, snow, sleet, melt ... repeat!!
It's a cruel lesson in expectations and reality. Spring too far off to ponder and winter too long to believe. Waking up in darkness so cold it freezes your heart and slows your brain. The heat sneaks past a veil of clouds and warms your cheeks for a brief glimpse of how things could be if only...if only you lived. SOMEPLACE. ELSE.
Wood stoves, furnaces, car heaters, bundled children, shovels, plows, ice, sand trucks, scraping windshields, running noses, frozen toeses.
All that winter fun, so wondrous in those early days of snow, loses its luster and seems like so much effort for the brief moments of joy it now brings. Digging deeply into the recesses of your brain to retrieve that scrap of memory which you will drain for all its comfort and hope. Beach sand. Bicycles. Warm Breeze. You strain to imagine.
Holding tight to that last tattered shred of sanity. Keeping that warm glint of resolve in your eye. Letting that icy realization pass over you that this season of darkness will continue.
We move on and scour the horizon for those bits of light.
Man, I love Winter and its challenge to us that we find it's beauty. Wherever we can.
