When you speak to me of winter, I will treasure the tapestry you weave.
Like how hungry ravens squawk by your compost pile waiting for scraps of potato peel, broccoli stems, or bits of yesterday’s sandwich; how you have come to revere this mystical courier who carries a soul’s secret dispatch across a thin veil to the Great Mystery.
I hang on your words as you describe the way wind howls through the merest gap in your bathroom window, canted during those long years of openings and closings. Remind me how you feel as you glimpse curls of snow, like white frosting, how you feel as you hear the old oaks groaning at wood’s edge.
Your ancestors’ stories emerge alongside a blazing fire as warmth radiates through layers of t-shirts and turtlenecks, knitted sweaters and corduroys. You describe card games on brief Sunday afternoons as jovial duels: Hearts, Double-Solitaire, Euchre, and Rummy. And when you lost – it’s true, you seldom won – you didn’t mind.
Remind me the color of your sky – is it a day of brightest blue or petulant gray? And of the next snowfall; how storms cause a necessary slowing, even while quickening the pulse.
Replicate the aromas that wafted from a stew you have most certainly made, hands busy chopping and stirring while you look out your kitchen window, marveling how puffed-up chickadees and cardinals, nuthatches and finches carry on without hesitation in gusty onshore winds.
Whisper your dreams during these longest, darkest nights – of being nestled by rhinos, visited by eagles, and spared by wolves. Recount how you’ve reclaimed the ancient dreamways, to reveal and honor the secret and most elemental wishes of your soul.
When you speak to me of winter, I will treasure the tapestry you weave.
Come sit around the bonfire with me. Tell me a story of winter.