Deer tracks lead me on the early walk to work. I’ve already been to Zup’s where it is evident that the heart of winter has begun beating again in earnest because it is so cold that their automatic doors slide open willingly, but slowly. First, in their parking lot and now, following those deer tracks through residential Ely, the wind smacks me around just to be sure I’m awake and focused.
I am. Winter is the most Minnesotan of our seasons at six months plus. It contains the most variety and the rarest of quick-change moments.
One night or day it can be, say, 20 below zero and the next 40 above.
Fifty or sixty degree changes make wardrobe choices difficult unless you happen to be one of those folks who begins wearing long underwear before Halloween and doesn’t stop until ice out. I’m not. I run hot. These changes, though are like mood swings. I find that they were handled better/easier when I was a kid and they rolled off our backs without being notified by our cell phones that we were experiencing a life-threatening alert.
At the end of February, we already have a few of those swings, up and down and down and up again, under our belts. They’re becoming less and less rare. It is the season of the need to watch “every move you make” like the Police and Sting once and still do sing about. I can certainly watch “every breath you take” on mornings like this.
Last week, our youngest, Juliet, took a big breath (indoors) and blew out the candles on her twenty-first birthday cake, officially marking the moment when our kids are all adults in every legal sense. It seemed monumental to me. Like a record breaking low temperature and windchill, but it also seemed like a beautifully normal winter day. It seemed as high as a rare Summer day in the nineties. Highs and lows and a bunch of middles. Just as we get used to the paths and the streets and the look of things, it snows or blows again and everything looks different all over again and there’s more work to do. The fires blow out and have to be re-lit.
Yes, winter is different to me, different than summer when we basically lock into a pattern of long sunny days and, if we get good rain, the need to add gas to the lawn mower and take a hot walk over the green stuff once a week. Yes, the garden and the flowers, etc., change, but the days are wonderfully full of warmth and birdsong and you rarely wake up blanketed in the white stuff. Whenever you have the time, you can put a boat or canoe into the water and drown some worms.
You can sit outside or sleep outside under the stars and be comfortable.
Ironically, those days fly by quicker than the Vs of geese flying over each fall. The loon song seems to arrive later and leave earlier each summer.
Summer seems short and then seems to get shorter. Winter hangs on. Fall disappears quicker than the idea of spring.
This is also how our lives with our kids have gone. Moments that linger (thankfully) both in memory and while they were happening and days that I wish wouldn’t have ended.
Scary moments. Exhilarating moments. Moments washed away with the wind and others captured around the fires and under the stars that seemed to last forever. Underneath it all, there has and remains, the hard, black ice, that will take you out if you forget that it is there. Things will slip away from you that were so very important at the time and when, and if you are lucky enough to be reminded of them, you’ll wonder how it ever happened that they could have slipped away. Not unlike several of my winter falls.
How is it that these three kids whose hands used to fit completely inside my own are now the age I usually think that I am still? How is it that I can see my dreams fulfilled in ways that I never intended or realized was possible to dream? This is the way of parenthood. “Every step you take… every single day, every word you say.”
Yeah, the lyrics don’t match up, cause the song is about something else entirely, but it does, because poetry is fluid and meaningful and just as applicable to my life circumstances as it can be to yours. That’s what makes it art. That’s so much a part of what each of them are made of. That and the stuff of stars.
