When Will It End?

Yes, this is another post about the weather. The seemingly endless winter. Snow, snow and more snow. If one more person points out how pretty the trees look dusted in snow I'm going to poke their eyes out with a spoon!

Yes, it is starkly beautiful, nothing but white carpeting the ground, the pine trees almost black in contrast to the blinding blank canvas of drifts. Some days the outdoors looks like a black and white photograph all black and white and shades of grey. But right now my spirit is thirsty for colour. My heart aches to see the first tender green shoots and delicate pink blossoms of spring, to feel on my skin a hint of warmth from a lemon yellow sun, to hear the lyric opera of song birds returned with the turn of the season.

This wouldn't be such a winter to be endured if all I had to do was write my next novel sitting beside a cozy fire with a glass of Merlot at my side. In fact, I think I would welcome this time to hunker down and go within. Alas, I haven't sold a million copies of my first book (yet) and I don't have household staff to buy food, shovel the driveway, take care of the livestock, take the garbage to the dump, and haul firewood. So instead, I have to dig out the driveway in the dark of the early morning so I can slog my way to work only to come home in the dark and stumble around feeding all the animals, shovelling yet again all before I can go inside and start a fire and get dinner on the go.

Three weeks after the big storm on Dec. 26 we got hit with yet another one. And this one was even bigger. We had over four feet of snow followed by rain. Roofs were collapsing, food and mail trucks couldn't get through to our village and avalanches just kept on happening. The night of the storm, I came home grabbed a flashlight and shovel so Cari would at least stand a chance of getting her truck onto our property when she came home from work. I was soaking wet from the pouring rain, my arms ached from lifting the saturated snow when I heard the sound of a freight train coming down the mountain. I could feel the ground reverberating from the avalanche as it let go. Ten minutes later it happened again.

I was never so grateful as when Cari finally arrived home and we headed in to our warm safe house for dinner. The next day we spent six hours shoveling off the barn, house and goat shed roofs and creating enough of a pathway to get to the barn. It would take another week to completely remove the snow from the walkways and driveway.

I am wise enough to know that this too shall pass and there is nothing I can do about the weather or the season. The more I struggle with this time of darkness and cold, all that will happen is I will be frustrated and depressed and winter will still be here. So, all I can do is accept this state of being for a little while longer and realize that spring will eventually makes its way around on the calendar and the light and burgeoning life will again return.

Just don't mention how pretty winter is because I still have my spoon handy.