the ache of winter

I wake up early with the dogs and they lumber-run with backsides swinging, down the hall and down the stairs and out the door. They come back in and up the stairs with me, to sit in the living room with coffee (not for them, just me) and blankets. The curtain rod on the window directly across from my chair broke so there is no covering the dull winter light of morning even though on this day, I’d like to close it out. The wind is howling, the trees are bending to it, and the clouds are dense and low and snow is coming.

Back in the fall on a drive in the country, my big burly husband said, “It’s going to be a hard winter.” I was all NO, NO IT’S NOT, IT’LL BE FINE, WHY DO YOU THINK THAT? He thought that because he knows so freaking much about nature and he was looking at a muskrat (like a beaver) shelter as we passed a lake. He said it was a big hearty shelter and that means they know a hard winter is coming.

Great.

It turn out the muskrats and the big burly know what they’re talking about. But I knew that already and just didn’t like the update that day. Winter is hard. It’s hard for every person in certain climates even if they love a lot about winter. Sooner or later, holding your shoulders up to your ears to stay warm, and having your eyeballs freeze, and shoveling…becomes an assault. Well, it’s not “sooner or later” for a lot of us. For a lot of us it is an immediate assault, as soon as the temps drop. I’m in that category.

But we’re hearty! That’s what we Minnesotans like to say because it’s true and also, I’m tired of being hearty.

Spring always comes, right? Please tell the muskrats to get ready for spring.

My daughter has been sick most of this winter, in one way or another. She had COVID in November. She got every cold and virus, and the most recent one isn’t going away. We are on week five now, of migraine-like headaches, dizziness, and a constant aching winter wind fatigue.

My ten year old is saying things, things that are not mine to share but break my heart in two. She is so weary. She is so tired of waiting to feel like her energetic pain-free self. She has been through so much. A heart surgery at three and then tonsils and adenoids out because of constant sinus infections and then Lyme Disease and catching every illness because maybe her immune system didn’t approve of long-term Lyme-free living. (They say it’s gone, but I don’t know if I believe it. Lyme is sneaky. One of the sneakiest.)

Right now she doesn’t believe that spring is coming, why would she? She hasn’t lived long enough to see it through, so many times. Her experience this far has been one struggle after another, medically and otherwise. So many, many Big Life Things have thwarted her childhood again and again.

All of this and a pandemic, too. So when she says she is so tired of life being so hard, who can argue?

Focus on the good, Elsie!

I have said that. I have tried to say it will get better and this too shall pass and we have to think positive and we have each other.

This does not help a person in the depths. So I apologized and started again, like spring. Now I say things like, I hear you or I’m so sorry. Or I say nothing, and I hold her closer and closer and give her aching head a massage and rub gently at her knotted neck. I have her lie down with me when she’s dizzy, again. Sometimes we play Uno for way too long. Long like winter, that’s what Uno can be.

But we’re mad. We’re frustrated. We are cooped up and fed up. We are in some ways quite sick of each other. We are weary together and angry at each other sometimes, for such nonsensical reasons.

Everything else is falling away and it’s like we’re floating through some alternate universe. I do the things and sometimes go places, but feel entirely unattached.

In the morning, she tells me about her dreams. She has the most vivid dreams and they are long like movies, or a game of Uno. They are often intense and scary, and then sometimes so ridiculous that we laugh and laugh.

There is so much absurdity to life. Long winters, mysterious illness, pandemics, nightmares.

Sometimes we can’t say, Hold on, spring always comes. Because yes, it does, if we’re talking about weather changes. But sometimes…sometimes, it seems change will never come, even though it always does. Some winters are so long, they suck the warmth and light from you in a way that feels permanent.

We are where we are and we are in this hard cold place. There were no muskrat shelters being built to signal what was to come, just the memory of other long hard winters that faded into spring.