Winter

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I could tell you about the cold. I could tell you that it has been near zero and the air takes small nips out of your skin. But I would rather tell you about the way the snow is landing on the skeletons of summer; how the hydrangeas are shrouded in the loveliest of ways

and the other plants, (the ones which provide the background in summer and are rarely noticed) I want to tell you how achingly beautiful they are now

I need to tell you how they are reaching up, this very moment to be embraced by snow. I am surrounded by those who hunger for spring, their bones already tired. But I need more than anything to tell you that in the morning there are blackberries,  rescued from the freezer’s depths and there is maple syrup from our treesand there are pancakes, warm on the woodstove and the ice lays feathers upon my window just so

And this is enough.

“With winter will come a new earth and seasonal smell, fierce and keen and very real,  the smell of snow”

~Henry Beston, Northern Farm

A Glimpse

We are driving down the highway, my husband at the wheel and our babes in the back. And I am sleeping. I sleep because our baby girl has been up teething and wrestling demons in her dreams and I am tired. “I don’t mind driving” he tells me, “you go ahead and rest”. So I do; I sleep the sleep of a thousand drowsy felines,  I curl around myself and I am content.

But something rouses me, a memory perhaps, or a task that needs tending to. And as the world streams into my consciousness I hear the sounds of my husband singing with our children and they are all laughing and it is so lovely. And I am so full of this ever-expanding love that I am certain I will burst.

“Oh, Look” my husband says to them, “Look at the beautiful birds”

“I am a bird, I am a bird, TOO”, my two year old laughs “I want to fly for REAL!“, my six year old shouts,and my husband replies, “We all have ways of flying,  pumpkins.”

And I know just what he means.

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