Winter Light

It's February nineteenth and a bright sunlight is streaming through the windows.  A light that makes everything pretty, and everything pale, and almost everything seem possible.   It reminds me of long, bundled up walks, late morning coffee, silk tea bags, knitting while reading school books, blasting music while taking hours to get dressed, and other vivid memories from high school.  But I've also been collecting new traditions of this season of winter (oh yes, winter has seasons, up here in Alaska).

 It's a time of afternoon baking and herbal tea.  Of writing as close to the window as I can get.  Of paper and scrap crafts and journal making.  Of reading fairy-tales and of grapefruit.  Of attacking pending projects because there's only a month left until life gets crazy at the greenhouse.  Of warm cars and cold engines.  Of new bursts of pictures and an itch to get sewing.  Of dreams of travel and a deep love of home.  Of ambitious summer plans (that probably won't happen) and massive questions.

It's the season of contradictions, without and with in.  It's sunny and warm inside, but outside it bounces from five to twenty below in a day.  It's this need to leave, to make changes, but the truth is that I dread what the results seem like what they must be.  Which is lonely.  It's this rush of energy and ideas, with resources in recession.  It's the need to make plans without the hope that they will happen.

 But even though I struggle to glean hope from a future I can't see, I'm finding hope within the little pieces of beauty in the present.  In splurging on some out of season plums to whip up a batch of plum poppy seed muffins.  In the pink stain left on the cutting board.  In a new kind of tea.  In the slow completion of a new pair of mittens.  In a chat with a preschooler while I work on choice material at my first job of the day.

 In icicles refracting light.  In BBC period dramas.  In a breathtaking color of a grapefruit.  In wiggly kindergartners and hilarious third-graders at my second job.  At the glittering ice crystals that coat my car each morning and the sunrise that advances with every day's drive.  In the cozy feeling of reading Dickens in bed and going to sleep early.   The is hope now, and it's the kind that doesn't have to rest on anything.  It just is.

Love, Clara