It’s all white here this morning.
I’m a little north of where Sunday generally finds me and what a difference.
Back home I expect the landscape is once again brown and green after that mid-week snow but up here, even just 90 miles closer to Canada, I feel as if I'm hiding inside a basket of clean sheets at age four in some long-ago game of Hide and Seek.
I look out the window at the pines, bowed down with the white stuff. It’s all cloudy outside with a sort of cold fog, like what rises from dry ice when you plunk it in the punch and the air is filled with something resembling fiberglass filaments.
Old Lady Winter, boy, you have to give her credit. She’s a great little housekeeper, zapping busy life into stillness with that icy wand.
It’s like the old game of Freeze Tag when it first happens in December. Remember Freeze Tag? When you’d run and run and when the leader shouted “Freeze!” you had to stop on a dime and turn into sculpture?
Winter does that for as long as she has her powers; freezes everything stiller than Sleeping Beauty’s castle and then covers it all with snow. You didn’t get all the leaves up last November? Not to worry. Winter casts her blanket and covers them up. That ragged woodpile? Covered. That scar in the earth where the truck veered off the road? Covered too with the merciful snow.
When you don’t want to feel your feelings, the loss, the impending loss or what have you, winter is your season.
But now Winter is ending.
Back home, what passes for our lawn, trounced as it was last fall by a two-month re-shingling project, a crocus riot is taking place. They all have their little tuba tops open and yearning sunward, even in the midst of all that dirt. Plus they escaped their bank and have begun a little Occupy movement of their own.
Here’s TO ‘em is all I can say is L'Chaim, L'Chaim To life!
