winter

We have a ways to go.

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Albert Bierstadt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

It’s supposed to snow today, but I’m looking at cloudless blue skies. Very cold cloudless blue skies; misleading cloudless blue skies. And apparently the snow isn’t due until midnight.

But the ground is white, mostly, and the bare trees standing still as though they haven’t had even a passing thought of spring. We have a ways to go.

That’s true of so many things right now. We have a ways to go. It’s cold, sometimes we get sunshine, but we have a ways to go. It’s winter.

It can be so hard to keep our eye on spring. It can be so easy to forget that some day, that white ground will be bright new green, that small delicate flowers will carpet the space between trees, and that those empty trees won’t be empty any longer. Spring always comes.

But we have a ways to go.

Check out my recaps of the hit new show “All My Traitors.” Recap of episode 2, “Lock Him Up” is available now!

Check out  my full-length novels: 

Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only)   

Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) 

 Her Cousin Much Removed

 The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management.

And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

Peruse Montraps Publishing.

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Winter Always Comes

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By Joseph Jacobs (Batten?) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Ah yes. Blogging.

It’s been a nice time of taking a step back, writing a little less after the hustle of #NaNoWriMo and watching the world wind down into winter.

Well not the world, of course, just my world. It’s funny how often we get the two confused. Where you are, right now, you might have the kind of air buoyant with warm flower freshness, a sky as blue, but mine is the blue of colored ice.

I watch as condensation from steam vents falls under the weight of freezing on this glistening day and think about the turn of the wheel of time. Onward we go, onward always, as we cannot know what is to come.

It’s been a long year.

Some day, people will look back on this chunk of history and there will be no question marks, aside from the universal how and why. They will know how it all turned out, if democracy triumphed, if democracy fell. If it’s the latter, our glorious history of a government for the people and by the people will be recast as something else, something sinister.

Keep an eye out for that.

But it’s not all over yet. Not just yet. Every winter has a beginning.

And every winter has an end.

Check out my recaps of the hit new show “All My Traitors.” Recap of episode 2, “Lock Him Up” is available now!

Check out  my full-length novels: 

Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only)   

Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) 

 Her Cousin Much Removed

 The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management.

And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

Peruse Montraps Publishing.

 

Shifting

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Oldřich Hlavsa [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Now that NaNoWriMo is over, we resume our regular blogging schedule. Probably. It’s possible I’ll be a little off the blogging wagon until the A-to-Z challenge rolls around and puts me back on my game.

We’ll see.

Winter is coming, and not in the way of the TV show and books I’ve never seen/read respectively, but in the Chicago way, meaning soon I’ll be wading through gray icy slush when I need to go to Walgreens. Ah Chicago in the winter.

But a Chicago winter is not without its charms, especially when you don’t have to be out in the weather. The snow quiets the traffic, sets a fluffy blanket of clean white over everything.

For about 15 minutes, and then it’s enter that gray icy slush. Good thing I have my boots from last year.

I like living in a place with seasons, one brutal, three with distinct personalities. I can feel my creativity shift with the weather. And you know I’m one to romanticize the act of writing, curling up while the wind howls with my computer and a cup of something hot.

Doesn’t that just make you want to get going with whatever you’re working on?

I thought so. Get to it.

Check out my recaps of the hit new show “All My Traitors.” Recap of episode 2, “Lock Him Up” is available now!

Check out  my full-length novels: 

Aunty Ida’s Full-Service Mental Institution (by Invitation Only)   

Aunty Ida’s Holey Amazing Sleeping Preparation (Not Doctor Recommended) 

 Her Cousin Much Removed

 The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management.

And download Better Living Through GRAVY and Other Oddities, it’s free!

Peruse Montraps Publishing.

Spring for a Day

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Yesterday, it was bright and springy, the air a mix of cold and warm, just enough to be refreshing. The sky was a freshly-scrubbed blue, and the sun a reminder that it could bring heat along with light.

Stretches of sidewalks were dry, as though the snow had never been there at all, it was all a long, gray, arctic dream. I felt hope, for the first time since November, that maybe the end of winter was near.

It was not a long-lasting hope.

No, today the sky is a dull cap of clouds, and huge swathes of ice still cling to the brown, muddy earth. It’s supposed to rain, and then snow. More snow. Again.

But maybe yesterday was a  promise that, no matter how bleak things might seem, the spring will always work to force its way through. It just might take a while.

The Earth’s in Charge Here. Always

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When it’s cold like this, really cold, the air from the humidifier hits the window and little droplets of water form along the bottom edge. There have been times this long, continuous winter, where they actually freeze, and it’s like the outside is seeping in through the glass, no longer content with only the outdoors as its domain.

I turn down the humidifier, but it doesn’t always help, the window so cold that any moisture at all in the air seems to find a spot to gather. I can turn it off completely, but then it gets arid, dry enough to draw any moisture from me, until I feel like a long-suffering mummy.

Either way, the weather wins.

It’s seasons like this when the Earth shows her sharp, glistening teeth, when we can see that we are mere guests here. We are only being tolerated.

Things could become very uncomfortable very quickly, and the planet wouldn’t care. We are so fragile, and the Earth so enduring. We found a niche, but niches don’t always last forever.

You’d think we’d try to keep ours going.

Is It Anything But Winter Yet?

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Everything looks icy today. The ground, the lake, the sky; it’s all a uniform shade of dull white, the kind with enough gray in it to make it heavy.

It’s been a long winter, and there is yet more to go still. I’m told the groundhog saw his shadow. I don’t think we needed his prognostication.

After weeks and weeks and weeks of it, it awakens something in you, something ancient beyond the humanity of us, something that makes you want to take to a soft bed with a pile of blankets and a television loud enough to drown out the wind.