The Longest Winter

What a good winter it has been for hibernation. If I’d had the option to curl, snout to tail, into a little ball back in September and slept and dreamt away the season, would I have?

Perhaps, but I know how the old stories go. There must be long winters, hard and cold, in every heroine’s tale. Times when the sun doesn’t warm and sets quickly. Times when although we can see the beauty that is every day before us, we can’t feel the beauty. The realization takes us by surprise, and it frightens us, and perhaps adds a chilling layer of longing. The longing to feel again.

But after every winter the light does come back, slanting into our rooms at a new angle and illuminating what was there all along in a way we haven’t seen before. Suddenly we feel a stirring again. A stirring toward something, that unnameable thing we know and don’t know.

The light shifts again, so quickly, and the feeling passes. The days are still short, but lengthening.

But the reminder of the “something else,” of the “something that calls to us” has washed over us and we are not the same. Something inside has quickened and we must tend to it.