The Infinitely Fleeting Whisper of Winter

Ede shared a great analogy at breakfast this morning. She just finished ‘The Secret Keepers’ by Kate Morton. She was musing about how people just continued on with their lives in the middle of the World Wars. Some kept going to work, kept looking for groceries, kept raising their children … meanwhile all around them they also continued to fight the daily battles. That is what the last few weeks have been like this winter. We plow, we shovel, we clean, do laundry, cook meals, go shopping, attend meetings, it snows, we plow, we shovel …

How strange and magical this season is. SO different from any of the others. Piles and piles of snow that can’t even exist at other times. A landscape drastically changed. Temperatures that require a whole separate wardrobe and means of transportation. Some days it seems that last year’s extreme cold and l … o … n … g … lasting snow season never ended and that when it started this year my brain forgot all of the mild spring, summer and fall days in-between. It is like we live in two different worlds and I have become disenchanted with the repeated experience of the magic that melds one into the other.
But then I stop the Bully – and the quiet of a winter blanket muffles all but the sounds of the chickadees playing in the cedar trees … And I pause. And I smile. At the beauty of the many colours of snow. At the waves and puffs and the drifts. At the whistle of the wind in the pines. The infinitely fleeting whisper of winter. And I remember how quickly this will be gone. I will be standing here in a few months trying to remember the cold dry air and the blue and white landscape. But I won’t be able to, any more than today I can remember the humid heat and living greens of summer. I can only remember … it will be gone!