Timeless Winter

These are the dead days of winter. They go on, and on and on, seemingly interminable. With cold, ice and snow, one blending into another, requiring heavy clothing, boots and socks. Dull days blend into the next, each week clicking off as if a blink in time. Then, suddenly, you see things, some tiny, others so large it horrifies you realize you've missed them all along. First, the days are longer at both ends. A southern garden bed on a daily walk shows sprouts of spring daffodils, then you notice how the buds on tree branches have swollen, some turning red, and the skunk cabbages have long since pushed their chartreuse leaves, tightly cupped, up through the swamp and wetlands. It is not appreciably warmer, but you know the change is coming. I think of mid-March as a time when, but for a freakish storm, the weather will truly have turned from winter into spring, when the unfrozen roads heave and the ground softens, and the time of mud arrives. These cycles turn so rapidly with age. I know them, I pace my expectations to how they unfold. Memories of this time enrich me early this year, earlier than before, as I look ahead to the time when spring truly arrives, when trees blossom and the coats and sweaters stay in their closets and drawers for lighter garments, for a time when layered running clothes revert to shorts and long sleeved T's. This year I can wait in anticipation. I know that all too soon, I will be sensing in the present the fullness of summer and the fall the follows. I am future seeing, an ordinary, earthbound visionary. I always wondered about people who were not in the present, but in some far away place and time, planning. I always felt they were missing the here and now. This is me today. I wonder if one day I will be content to sit contemplative and reminisce? I hope that I will be able to experience many more of them, far ahead, and that I will not regret the end of once timeless as my own time runs to its inevitable, unknowable close.