Where the Birds Always Go
Wednesday, January 6, 2016
It's been an unusually warm winter this year. On Christmas Eve all I needed was a light sweater layered over my dress to keep the chill at bay. While I am certainly not longing for the 3 degree mornings we had last winter, there seems to be something wrong with dancing in warm, golden evening light on Christmas Eve. I felt like there should have been at least a little more chill to crack through my skin and tickle my bones, but instead, I got one evening of golden sunlight followed by a week of various tints of gray hovering above the trees.
Maybe it's the grey skies, but I have felt
like writing again. Reading, writing, and a little more reading while I wait
for those first Kentucky snowflakes to waltz away from the sun and into my
eyes. Today is more waiting, just like yesterday, and I wish there was a little
snow with a longer afternoon so I could photograph (really, the sun sets at
5:20!). But those days are for the future. Today, I feel like letting words
spill onto my screen like a milk jug toppled over onto homework. I don't have a
lesson to teach, only words to dance across pages. Maybe I am that milk that is
spreading, spreading, like a bird stretching its wings.
Lately, I have felt like a bird. Not
because I am dancing in the golden hour in the winter, but because our winter
feels like a spring. When the birds fly south for the winter, how far do they
go? Do they jet all the way to sunny Florida, or do they stop when the skies
begin to leak warmth again? If our skies are leaking their warmth and goodness,
do not the birds stand by us and enjoy the sun as well? Have they stopped to
love it with us, or do they keep going to for even better rays?
These thoughts run through my head on the
dark mornings, but then I see all my dead wooded areas. There are places where
the flowers once were and branches devoid of any life. The ground snaps when I
walk and things rattle when the wind brushes them with its airy scarf and I
don't hear any birds. I hear strings of life rattling, trying to grasp the
branches before they blow away for good. So I guess winter is here. Winter is
playing a trick on us. It has taken all the joys of the other seasons but not
given us the promise of fluffy white blankets and frozen drippings like glass
blown onto pine needles. Winter is being more cruel than it ever has been, but
it won't be that way for much longer. The forests and the plains will have a
layer of cotton on them soon enough, and then I know that the birds will slowly
begin to creep back across state lines and those Mean
Reds will be put to death
until the next winter.
In the meantime, I shall write, let coffee
slide into me like a waterfall, and read the beautiful words of those proven to
be more effective that mine. Life will be a series of beautiful moments.
Stay beautiful,
XOXO Liz
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