Dead of Winter

The solstice may be the shortest day of the year, but it's not the darkest day of winter. For me, winter's at its bleakest sometime around the middle of January. The holidays are spent and spring is still too far away. The maples aren't even thinking pink yet.

We've gotten off light here in Virginia the last couple of years, but this year we got an arctic blast, after all the storminess of November and December. It seems the very atmosphere is upset, right along with me.

The ground was saturated when the freeze came, so now the top few inches of earth have been crunched up with the expansion of the water. Geologists have a name for it (it escapes me at the moment) but when spring comes with her heavy rains, there will be a fresh load of sediment in the streams; ancient bits of rock and organic matter will be loosed and finally get to travel again. I expect it will be easy to put the garden in. But for now, I'll dream of tomatoes and peppers and expanding the garden with new vegies for Jordan, and I'll stack fire wood.

I've been avoiding this journal and Facebook and even personal email for a couple of weeks. I've tried to focus on school and the long-neglected chores of home. David's absence follows me around, no matter what I'm doing or where I am. It's funny; when he was alive, we'd often go for a couple of weeks without talking to or seeing each other and I wouldn't be bothered or miss him too terribly much. But now, knowing I won't see him again until my own death, I can't stop thinking about him.

My ADD doesn't help. I'm in the middle of class explaining how the sun makes Pacific Ocean water into Virginia snow, and without warning I see David playing in the snow. Like moving with a broken bone, I'm suddenly caught by the pain. I tell myself to save the memory for later, I swallow, breathe, and go on with the lesson.

I remember the picture I took of the three oldest boys - still little- about two, three, and four years old, the three of them piled up on a sled, with David on the bottom, then Mark, and Stephen on top, all bundled up, red faces and bright eyes shining out from under their caps, tolerating Mom staging the shot, deliriously happy with the new joy of snow and sledding. I'm sure this was a day the wood stove was kept stoked, play clothes tumbled continously in the dryer, and cocoa steamed in little cups, making little brown mustaches stretch wide above all-day smiles. I remember Papa had come outside to play with us, explaining the how-to's of winter fun the old-fashioned way; he pulled the boys on the sled behind the tractor. I can still hear them all laughing. It was Utopia.

So, by God's grace this kind of joy is ahead for Stephen and Jessica, and my other children as well. The deposit they will pay - that any parent pays, is the certainty that days of sledding with little ones will fade into memory, a definition of bittersweet, an image and a scent in the vapor of life. No matter how brightly an event is burned into a mind, it will be only there, trapped, if one is lucky, in electrically triggered brain cells, until the body is left behind. I wonder; may we take our memories with us when we go? I hope so. I hope David can revisit these happy days of his childhood. If I close my eyes, I can be there with him.

xxoo