Fallow field and blue bonnet sky and yellow sunset and dripping gutters and bird song.
A hedge full of fat brown birds, a roof full of crows, squirrels hopping like Tarzan from tree to tree.
Fallen trees covered by snow then revealed in the lush melt of a sunny day.
In our home cats sleep on vents and children grow and dream of far away lands and city streets bustling with cafes and friends.
I think of stories, of near misses and miraculous meetings. Of an open gate that was closed but on the other side, a cut lock. It only looks closed in order to fool the Selfish Giants who don’t like puppies romping over green fields.
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The same things come back and visit again and again at the end of winter. Always there are memories of sunlight. I think of the way the sun hit the moss and the pine trees in the green gold light of a Baguio sunset. I think of how in the middle of the summer, on a quiet hot afternoon, I can go onto my porch and look up at the maple trees.
For about five minutes at the end of the sunset, a beam of sunshine will light the very tops of the maples trees and if the breeze is blowing it is time to go and stand and look up at them. Never mind taking a picture, you will lose the image while trying to catch it. Just look at it.
Sometimes on a late afternoon, a shaft of light will come in the back window and shine on the door leading to the butler’s pantry and turn the door into a speckled pattern of honey gold. Like a child I will lose myself in the play of light on wood.
In the middle of the summer, all the cold will be forgotten. There will be an abundance of days and things to do. Beaches and blueberries, corn and barbecue, hammocks and bonfires. Estate sales and book sales and walks in the warm nights.
And stars and moons and fireflies. But perhaps the reason for all that lushness, is this quiet severe season of white and gray.
I will never say I hate the winter, because it has given me so many secret gifts that have stunned me. Light when I least expected it, a clarity of air and breath, and vistas that are forbidding because of the solemnity of their loneliness.
Everything around me says, “Soon.” Soon it will all begin again.
Kathleen, I have a winter heart. I anticipate bare trees, the cold singing of the wind at the corners of the house, the chase and catch of it across parking lots and down the streets in our neighborhood, grey days and snows now that are always a surprise. My first bright, audacious jonquils bring a bittersweetness that winter is dying and spring is being born again, that my wild birds will not need my tending, and I will have to endure the changing circumstance of light for sometime now. Reading what you have written honestly makes me wish my heart were otherwise. So very lovely…