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It snowed last night. It's only October, but often in October it snows here. It always seems too soon, as if Nature, indignant, is just trying to demonstrate her power to rearrange our lives. Yesterday it was summer and I was growing tomatoes. Now the still-green tomatoes hang on blackened vines, chilled and dying in the snow. Yesterday I wore shorts and today I wear winter tights and a sweater. The heat is on. The cat is in. I wonder where all the gloves have gotten to.
Nothing stays. It's not supposed to.
One day I am exultant. The next day I am quite sure that quite a ways back my life took a terrible wrong turn and that I am plodding in desperate misery over the road to absolutely nowhere. I am tired then I am caffeinated, awake. My kids are happy little boys and now they're teenagers and always furious with me. My youngest son could play the violin and now, at practice, he sounds like he is trying to kill a cat.
And this is all, according to my thoughts, supposed to be bad somehow, or troubling. But it isn't. The snow just lies on the ground, blanketing the world in slushy ice. It is indifferent to my attempts to deem it good or bad. It is cold and wet and white. It kills the garden and adds moisture to the thirsty reservoirs.
Teenagers press up against the sides of an imagined bouncy house, threatening to blow right through the side. They slam around, hitting little hopping children who scream righteously that they stop. They don't stop, can't stop. Their insides are made of lightning. They are huge, untenably intermediate creatures, gasping for air between the surface and the depths. They radiate anger, passion, lust, amusement—big feelings all covered with zits. It's like springs in a machine, this emotion: more energy than they will ever have again. Far more than I.
The snow just keeps on being snow then water then steam. And I keep on being sad and then happy and then at quiet peace. Until I freeze again.
Anger and passion and sadness and joy all sit next to one another and seep into the spongy soil.
I love your eloquence.
ReplyDeleteThe weather doesn't affect my mood as much as it seems to affect most people.
ReplyDeleteHeadaches do, though. I can be in the best mood ever, and five minutes with a headache will convince me that I might as well end it all, that my life is complete crap.
Maybe if I lived somewhere that had seasons, the weather might outrank headaches for me...
Beautiful.
ReplyDeleteI have come back to this again and again in the months since it was written. It never fails to move me. Hope you are doing okay.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Masked Mom. I'd forgotten all about. I am okay. I am just not feeling like writing and not making myself do it anyway. I suspect this is temporary. It is nice to see your "voice." Very nice.
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