If there is one thing that I can’t
bring myself to understand, it is how a place filled with sunlight and fall
leaves can go from this to a full blown, frozen darkness overnight. Where I am from, the first snow always seems
to be light and fluffy; the grass is still green beneath it, the ground still
soft and only a short while after it is as if it never snowed at all…. Where I
am from winter seems so much more gradual and one can accommodate themselves to
it.
But here,
when it starts snowing, it’s a blizzard, and massive snow drifts. When it starts snowing here it is cold and
windy and everything is covered and consumed overnight. There is no time to say ‘good bye’ to the fall
or to the sun; cold darkness seems to consume the entire place immediately. There is no gradual change; it goes from
warmth and sun to cold and dry with no state of transition.
Yesterday
afternoon, I was walking in the sun and looking at the glowing fall leaves and
kicking dirt as I dragged my feet and today the entirety of the ground is
frozen solid and icy. The leaves and
grass are not just covered by flattened by the snow. It is as if everything has been covered and
suffocated; it is like some dark force has decided to take the joys and
beauties of this world and wrap them in a cold and icy layer of darkness.
I may sound slightly dramatic and
summer-biased in my words right now but I just have this image in my head of
this dark hand hovering over, and touching everything in its path with a sickly
virus that spreads quickly to the core and this virus is not only over the
things that I love (like trees and plants and dirt and grass and the sun etc.)
but it is also falling heavily over me right now.
I have never liked winter or really
cared for snow (other then on the odd occasion that I can appreciate it’s white
sparkles gleaming in the sun) but, I don’t
ever remember feeling so consumed and overwhelmed by it’s darkness as I do
right now. Maybe this is just an early
sign that I need some vitamin D! I know
and believe that God has created winter and snow with a purpose and that there
is beauty that lies within it but I am
having great difficulty finding it and being thankful for it in these present
moments of bitter nausea and deep rooted tears of dread.
