I’m drawn to winter pictures from other years since in the Boston area, we haven’t yet had any ‘real snow’ that has stuck around for more than a couple of days. We’re in record-breaking territory as of now.
Let alone snow that doesn’t stick, we’ve been teetering almost without much cold this winter! But last week, we had a record-breaking, polar vortex cold-snap. For us, it was about a day and half but it did its damage. We’re talking high wind and double-digit minuses.
Lately, these spells greet my siblings first in Texas before heading northward to us.
This ‘ice dam claw’ picture is from Feb 2017 at my mother’s house in western Maine. Now, a thousand years later, I am grateful for being born in that neck of the woods, a part of the earth where growing up meant meeting winter every. single. year.
I can’t imagine my life without the visceral knowing of cold, winter, snow banks, ice, slush, and stark nostril breaths, or barren brightness, isolating and endless gray, steely days where the world is at its deadest.
Maybe I’m romanticizing it now that I live 3 hours south, nearer to the ocean’s modulating effect or I’ve got the ‘absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder’ bug.
Seasoned experience with cold is as good as any other temperature for life training where animal comforts are narrowed, where you lean down, hold onto your hat, and do your best with the provisions at hand.
May you find some lightness even when the air makes your face numb.
Those restrictive extra layers save your fingers and toes and let you explore closer.
As with those nutty cold water plungers, befriending cold takes practice. Growing up with it, I wasn’t practicing that on purpose.
It left its imprint. It handed me a definition.
A not-always-friendly landscape that now comforts, and lives as muscle memory, as family, as original home.
Fun to watch…..and see.
Author
Thank you Kathleen!