Winter Dreams

I adore winter.

Those who live elsewhere think it never gets cold in Texas. It certainly doesn’t seem to get as cold as it did during my childhood, when we enjoyed at least one snow day each school year and our parents suffered multiple bouts of black ice. Now our snows are freaky…like the March week this spring when we had six inches one day and nine two days later, with a 60 degree day in between that cleared the yard completely.

The climate has definitely changed in my lifetime.

But winter still arrives acutely in these parts. As I always remind some shivering transplant, our only defenses against the frigid Canadian cold fronts are barbed wire fences.

Everyone has a story. My friends C & L “fondly” remember a west Texas high school football game where balloons were released during a balmy halftime show, floated gently northward on a light southern breeze, and blustered back during fourth quarter on a fierce north wind that dropped the temperature 40 degrees.

My special memory? The year before I married, our town endured ten days with high temperatures below ten degrees. The Man had renovated a turn-of-the-century farmhouse. Our Christmas tree stood against the north wall, and the water froze in the stand. We went out twice a day with an axe to chop holes in the tanks so the cattle could get to water; the ice was four inches thick at the edges. The night skies were crystalline. I’m not sure any subsequent Christmas has ever measured up in terms of natural magic.

This year we’ve been weather waiting. Waiting for rain. And waiting for winter. And I’ve been waiting: for understanding, enlightenment, calm, clarity, direction.

Our first  “norther” blew through this week. While the slight promise of snow flurries did not prove true, the wind chill did drop into the teens and the koi pond was encased in a thin film of ice. I was caught off guard by it. I’d left the house in a t-shirt and yoga pants, but somehow never made it to the Y, instead whiling the day away with coffee and a book at Starbucks. I stepped outside at 2 p.m. into a different world: gray, gusty, and 35 degrees toward winter.

I was early to pick up Small Child that afternoon. First in line, I turned off the engine and listened to the roar and whistle. And as I watched the wind, as I could almost see its linearity – north to south – in the motion of tree limbs, I felt my need for winter stir deep inside me, particularly sharp as my fiftieth birthday approaches.

I want to stand, vulnerable and exposed, facing the north.

I want the wind, harsh and unforgiving, to rip the unnecessary, the obsolete, the dead weight from my soul and my life just as it tears the last remaining leaves from the trees.

I want to know my basic architecture, my trunk and my branches, from the roots to the tiniest twigs, with nothing to interfere.

I want, when the wind dies down, to gleam under the crystal stars of the winter sky.

I want the snow to come.

I want to rest under its blanket, to store up energy.

I want to dream of what is to come, of the next chapter, of the new growth that lies ahead.

I want the peace of  winter solstice.

May it come to me and to you, my friends.

Another 40 years...

Here and there, as I've caught bits on radio or television or scanned blogs and print, I've seen references to the presidential election of 1968 and the George Wallace campaign in particular. Readers, I'd been thinking those same thoughts but had not voiced them. To prove that I am not recycling content, I'm going to share another elementary school memory.

1968, for you pretty young things, was not a pretty year.  1968 is why protesters are now contained in fences far away from political conventions. Why you don't see coffins come home on CNN.  People were dying abroad and on American soil for the issues in play in that fall's election.

I grew up in a Texas suburb that had "desegregated" by writing a policy. The policy was "school choice."  Students could attend any school in town, but they could only ride a bus to their neighborhood campus. Again, for younger readers, this was not the open door shindig it may appear. Many families had one car, and that car was used for one person to drive to work. Most elementary children got to school on foot or bike or on the bus.  This policy remained in place until my graduation, as far as I know. In 1977, my graduating class of 626 was "integrated" by perhaps ten African-American students.  I never sat a class with one of them. Our school song was "Dixie." The confederate flag flew at football games. Yet we were, for the most part, good kids. 

But I digress.

At the Blue house, politics veered pretty darn far to the right, at least where my father was concerned.  My mother never said much, which I now know meant she spoke volumes. But "hippies," "liberals," "communists," and "Humphrey" all pretty much added up to the same thing in the paternal lexicon. I honestly don't remember which of the other two candidates he actually supported. I suspect I'm afraid to remember.

But I digress yet again.

Even in elementary school, it was impossible to escape the campaign.  All most of us had in our homes for entertainment was a single television, so we all saw the same news. At least our input was fairly consistent. 

Every day at lunch, in the School Cafetorium, we'd peel the tops off our "ice milk cups" and start politicking. Amid a fair amount of trash talk (always within acceptable volume limits, lest the red-yellow-green traffic light of silence glow crimson), nine- and ten-year-old Americans would vote with their wooden spoons.

N

H

W

The letters were carved into the pristine surface of our dairy-ish confections. I will admit, right here and now, that I did not commit firmly to Humphrey, a fact I now regret. I like many others vacillated between the N and the H, depending on the mood of the day or the friend of the moment. 

But you know what?

The W kids never wavered. They knew. They sat together, and they never changed the letter they carved. 

The cafeteria contained nothing but white faces*. Those kids (well, most likely their families, but still...) may not have known what Wallace was for, but I'm pretty sure they knew what he was against.

And that is exactly what I remember when  I watch those clips of angry, fearful faces at McCain/Palin events. 

The Wallace Kids.

* I no longer live in the town mentioned above. Out of curiosity, I visited the school's website. Its population now appears to be significantly made up of children of color, which suggests that the same de facto segregation policy is still in place.