Growing Versions

Winter exposes what the foilage covers up the rest of the year. Trash blows around and gets frozen into snow banks. The temperature at times forces us to seek shelter, it curtails roaming. We dress in layers. Layers give us options to regulate our temperature. I put on the warmer shirt, the sweater, the scarf and the coat. More if I am going to be standing around, less if I am going to be carrying it all. I enter the restaurant. I take off one layer, and then another. I sit in a pool of noon day sunlight behind glass and forget that layers will be necessary again in one short hour. I stand up and ready myself to go back out. On goes the sweater, the scarf, the coat. I step onto the street, bundled up until I need to delayer again.

Christmas culture is full of miniatures.  Mini villages lit from within, mini skates hanging from the tree, mini tree cookies, gigantic snowflakes, but mini Jesus and his family and all his visitors, mini booze bottles made of chocolate and a mini town under glass that fills with snow when you shake it. While these things are shrunken, the feelings are exaggerated, the memories over sized, the rifts magnified, the love enormous, the shopping is excessive and we eat bigger plates full of bigger portions, and we drink more out of  fuller glasses. It is sometimes hard to feel like the right size at this time of year.

Each night, when I come home from work, I get this urge to light a candle. For me it is not thought through or particularly intentional, just an instinct. I started doing it a few years ago, as the supper hour starts to gradually get darker. It is a flame that invites me to stay, not go. To put my house in order and make it a place I want to be. With it's glow, I begin to make use of the fuel I have harvested from the summer sun. I turn my attention inward, to protect us from the cold.

I've felt this way before  and no doubt I will again, after all it is seasonal, but this time of year always confuses me.  It is warm enough that part of me gets tricked into thinking summer is just about to begin.  Another part of me, stumbles over a trip wire that signals a torrent of let's make soup, plan Christmas and nesting feelings. When I walk off the beach for the final time of the season, it feels like a raw wound opens in my chest. In time, slowly, the two broken flaps of skin find each other and knit together quietly.

  We finally decided that ice had its purposes.

Like all good things, we've come up with a good reason to do it twice. Inspired by a t.v. show, the kids put the wheels in motion and we celebrated halfiween (after two days of preparation) this weekend. Halfiween, Hallowe'en's shadowy April twin, was a little spooky, and there were treats and costumes.  Apples were a decent substitute for a pumpkin  Home made treats were improvised. The floating objects really gave the place that Hallowe'eny vibe.

This is the season that we make bunk bed caves and forts and snow houses every day.  We suspend blankets over our heads and let the light of a tiny flashlight make the whole thing glow.  There is one at the foot of the stairs, another one behind the couch, one between two mattresses.  We feel this urge to create new structures to cocoon us until we can knock them all down in spring with our wings.

We changed the microwave clock, but the rest changed themselves. I only trust the microwave.

This week the weather turned cold.  Until Monday, I was usually comfortable in skirts without anything on my legs and bare arms were not crazy.  And then, we woke up and could practically see our breath inside  the house.  We have had a good run. A long time coming summer, surrendered gracefully to autumn and the warm days have lingered until now. All week, even when it was not dark yet, I felt the urge to burn a candle.  To have that flickering presence gave me comfort and I could not make supper without one. I could not quite put my finger on why I suddenly thought about lighting one. And then I thought about the tendency to light candles when someone dies or is missing, or lighting candles in church and at romantic interludes. Lighting candles sears a path between us and someone or something else.  It illuminates a way to connect with someone we can't see and the softer, heat generating light helps us get intimately acquainted with some...

We are about to make the big transition that we make every year at this time. It is the transition to being fully dressed.  We are working up to finding regular (indoor/outdoor) shoes and shirts and pants. We are not dressed yet, but we are thinking about it.  Socks will come much much later, but the sweaters and shoes are not far off.

Gone are the spongy bottomed winter boots, staunched by bunched up socks. They have been replaced, dumped unceremoniously in the Sears garbage can on the way out of the store.  After all, this season requires the proper equipment. New boots, that do not leak, have been purchased just in time for river channeling, bridge configuring and rock chucking. This important work is the flip side of ice crunching, slush brook redirecting and snow drift levelling.

Enough deconstruction has gone on for one season and we are only 3 days in. All the once good ideas have been stripped for parts. I very nearly let a pot boil, dry but I didn't. I am ready to plant something, paint something or build something new. Lucky for me, now that birthday season is upon us, fresh construction plans are being drawn up.  This week it has been decided upon that we will construct a fun fair in cake form.  That is the plan. It is not necessarily my plan or a wise one. It is an ambitious plan and it is going to have to involve a flexible vision, bendable candy  and it is not probably going to be accomplished without some panic induced grouchiness, but it is a construction plan. We are going to build it from the gumdrops up.

*Of or pertaining to yesterday. We've been plunked into a snow drift once again. The first day of spring no less.  We were all so ready to categorise this day the first page of the new chapter of the year. It did not begin as rehearsed.  Technical glitches I guess. Hold on. Hold that thought. We have some precipitation to get out of our systems first. Yesterday was winter. Today is spring.

On the way home last night, the light was saturating every crevice and following us all the way home. How about you?

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.-Pedro Neruda

 As we increasingly become self-conscious about the Christmas lights still tacked up on our porch,  we still feel the need to lighten the dark days, even if they are technically lengthening. I notice we are all a little bit asleep. A little reclusive, a little far from each other, as the cosy den threatens to muzzle us with insulation.  We still need a solstice state of mind.

Teeny icicles, not yet given enough time to get humongous, came into being in thin air this week. Out come the mittens, and the ritual of dressing that is reserved for this time of year. I am trying hard not to hate it. A big part of learning to like this season is by following in the crunchy ice encrusted footsteps of my kids.  Both got gear for enjoying snow this year.  Snowpants, warm boots and copious "pairs" of mittens (most of them still paired up, yeah!) all go on without complaint because they know that it all means one thing, fun in the snow is coming their way.  Even when we were waiting for a bus a little too long (for my liking) in what is in my mind a desolate place (a business park), they still managed to find the terrain magical and exciting to explore. As my knees knocked together down below, they frolicked high above on the ridge of a crusty snow bank.  I have to say, that despite the initial discomfort and bulkiness that I experience ...

This morning we were greeted by frosty grass and crunchy, icy leaves. The Christmas parade put us all in a hot chocolate frame of mind. The icy frost has properties that crumbly leaves and sugary sand do not. I am coming around a bend, my thoughts crystalizing, as the water solidifies while we sleep.

You have spent your whole life with elegant speeches. For sometime you should walk alone in the gardens of silence. ~ Rumi  I sort of stumbled into the Victorian era Public Gardens last week.  It was the first post-tropical storm day here in Halifax.  The rain had not yet swooped in and the temperature was balmy.  A lot of leaves remained on the trees and everything had a glow to it against the grey sky.   The moisture in the air made everything slick and alive, but the rot had set in. The next day the rains swept up the coast and by now the rain and wind together have removed a lot of those falling leaves. It was a good reminder of all the beauty in the garden.  Beauty can found there not just when the buds are emerging, not just when the blossoms are burgeoning, not just when the trees are umbrellas of leaves.  It can be found in the shiny rotting leaf and the promise of new growth next year. Oh yeah, spring and summer do not have th...