Esquimaux Kiss

The snow has been falling steadily all day. As evening closes in, I'm wishing I had a ski pulk in which to bundle my son and pull him behind me for a nighttime ski through the woods. The powder on the ground is just perfect for a wintry outing. He could fall asleep to the hoots of owls. The silence of snowfall.

I'm beating eggs. Butter in the pan. Mushrooms browning. I pour the yellow liquid over fungi and sprinkle in parmesan, sea salt, fresh ground pepper. The kettle is boiling and he bubbles over, too, in his jolly jumper. Eyes gazing at trees out the window, he blows raspberries, his face aglow with the strange mix of firelight and the blue of twilight. Little pomegranates for cheeks. My heart feels full.

I'm thinking back to when I was a kid. Winters when drifts reached up to the windows. All those snow days off school. So much white stuff, my brothers would build snowforts the size of castles, big enough to crawl through and disappear into the Arctic regions. One snowy armoury built each end of the garden and iced over. An igloo as the base and a chimney-like stack through which to stand and toss, duck and hide. We each amass our cylindrical weaponry in small piles; peek out and pummel. This is how I develop a good throwing arm.

I pour myself an Ovaltine and my thoughts drift to you and me as kids. Growing up in the same town. Mere blocks apart. Two years, eight months apart. To the day. The same snowfalls fell into our open mouths, melt against tongues, are swept by the arc of arms into wings of angels. Tonight, when I think on those snowforts, it's not war that comes to mind. Instead, I'm wishing I could take your small hand in mine and crawl into one of 'em with you as the children we once were. Huddle together in our snowsuits, look up through frosted chimneys and count stars. Watch our laughter crystallize as our breath freezes mid-air. It's not as if we haven't known the child in each of us, so clearly discernible when we finally meet in our 20s. Visible long before your beautiful mum takes out that old box. Photos spread all over the floor of a living room on Twin Oaks. He's there in his stutter, the stuffing of hands into pockets. She's there in her freckles and the biting of lips.

Tonight, the snowflakes falling so softly make me imagine leaning close, holding our breath. Knees shivering. Frozen faces hovering.  A kind of first kiss. An Inuit Cupid's harpoon flies.

Kunik.

The timid, tremulous touch of noses while we close our eyes, squeeze mittened hands and confuse the howl of the wind for the wolves in our beating hearts...

Music: Igloo (Where the Wild Things Are Soundtrack), Karen O and the Kids

Whiteout

whiteout–noun

1. Meteorology.
   
   1. a condition, found in polar regions, in which uniform illumination from snow on the ground and from a low cloud layer makes features of the landscape indistinguishable.
   2. a condition of heavily falling or blowing snow in which visibility is very poor.
2. an act or instance of whiting out with a correction fluid.
3. a white correction fluid used for this: a bottle of whiteout.
4. a mistake, as in typing, that has been whited out with a correction fluid.

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Winter is my second favourite season, after autumn. There is something so clean and crisp about new fallen snow. And it does have the same effect as whiting out the past. A new snowfall is a fresh start. It wipes away old mistakes. It is a clean slate. Perhaps this is why the ancient Celts began their year with winter approaching. The Celtic New Year is celebrated on November 1st, when the earth is dying. Winter is the season of the wise and wizened crone. When the sun is born on the winter solstice. Yuletide. The longest night of the year gives birth to the beginning of longer days as the sun begins to stretch and lengthen his fingers towards the longest day of the year, the summer solstice.

This isn't why I love the winter, though. I do feel a thrill over how the earth is blanketed in white. I adore when boughs are laden, when fences look frosted. But the primary reason I {heart} winter is because it is the season when I've tended to fall deeply in love, to fall with the soft, sensual slowness of huge, fist-sized flakes. The bulk of my memories of feeling first love or new love are tied up somehow with the sound of crunching snow underfoot on a walk holding mittened hands. With the breath of whispered words hanging solid in the cold, crisp air. With the memory of the aurora dancing above a first kiss. Making out to the crackling sound and smoky scent of a logfire burning. The first-time, butterfly-flipping and laughter-drenched lesson on how to do donuts in your car. How a full moon lights up the trees during a midnight cross-country ski. The sparkling blue diamonds of a snowy landscape at dusk when one's heart is filled up to the brim like a steamy mug of hot chocolate.

Whiteouts make for poor visibility. Love is blind.

This is why I love winter. Tis the season for cuddling, snuggling, for bundling up. For seeking warmth. For finding someone to get warm with. And this winter I've my own little bundle to snuggle. To share sticking out of tongues and tasting of snowflakes. To eke out the imprint of angels with flapping arms.
 I look at the snow that fell from the sky last night and painted my landscape a bright, new white. I will let it be my clean slate, the erasure of long-ago mistakes. A new beginning in my breast. And this winter, for the first time, my very own newborn son to celebrate. Yuletide approaches... Hallelujah.
*definition taken from an online dictionary.
Music: River, Joni Mitchell

Cumulonimbus

As I write this with evening coming on, the fields surrounding my 1.3 acres are blanketed for the first time this Autumn. Snow. Not just any snow. His very first snowfall. I am recounting the day. Sometime after 6:30 a.m., I reach for my camera. I had been lying in bed in the dark watching the picnic table collect soft, large flakes on the back deck as I listen to him talk to himself, his favourite thing in the mornings as he awakens. I guess he figures he will let me sleep while he amuses himself. Perhaps, since he wakes up in semi-darkness, he assumes he is alone somehow. But I like to think he can hear my breathing, a kind of security blanket that warms him enough to coo in perfect contentment and concoct gurgling noises deep in his throat. I turn on the light and approach the crib. He beams up at me. Where did I find this child? How did he find me? An owl, deer and robin look on as I lift him out of his forested bedding and pull back the hanging on the deck door to reveal The White Stuff. He is so young still, one week away from turning 6 months old, I'm not sure what exactly he makes of it all. I imagine his little mind like the inside windings, wheels and tick-tocks of an old grandfather clock, turning and formulating each New and Wondrous Thing he absorbs and locking it away somewhere to pull out again later. Referencing. Storing. The squirrel on his crib bumper eyes my son's hungry mind warily and grasps onto the nut she holds a little more tightly.

This morning we drive into town early. My car needs a 110-point inspection at Crappy Tire. Across the way is Starbucks so I stroll him over under a blue, but cold sky, the morning's snowflakes melted away. We lay siege on one of the smaller, couchy-type chairs. What astounds me as I sit and sip and nurse simultaneously is the myriad of languages I hear. Two women speak Italian three tables over. At least, it's a Latin language that is not French. I assume Italian because of the beautiful hand gestures the women sign to accompany each point they are making as they converse with each other. They don sweats and lycra as though they have just both come from a workout, but still look sophisticated in that oh-so-European way. The gym, perhaps, wasn't enough since they pump their arms up and down and all around as they talk. They evoke a silent film and I feel like a voyeur as I can nearly guess their entire conversation through the movements of their eyes, mouths and hands. Listening to their lilt, I smile and dream about sipping this decaf latte with my babe at my boob in Florence instead; close my eyes to imagine it. Just behind me another couple chats away and I am suddenly thrown Northeast to Prague. As if on cue, cumulonimbus sweep in, blotting out the sun. No, it's not a Harry Potter broom. Cumulonimbus are the types of clouds which carry rain or snow within them. And for the second time this morning, it's snow falling. Not softly, though. It slants and hurtles toward the ground. A gaggle of teenagers from the nearby highschool rush in wearing winter coats over gym shorts and knee-high socks, giggling and squealing as they shake the weather from their goose-bumped limbs.

The woman has turned to fuss over my sonshine. He produces My Favourite Thing (his shy smile). Her name is Jindra, I learn. Pronounced Yin-drah. She spells it out for me. Her husband tries to out-shy my son. I smile. This is what I miss about Toronto when I lived there. All the varied cultures everywhere you'd go. I'm surprised to find a bit of a melting pot here in my old hometown, but happy to discover this area has been growing and stretching, morphing into a somewhat more global creature while I've been living rurally the last decade. I will be leaving the countryside in the spring. The thought makes me happy and sad simultaneously, but that's par for the course where I'm concerned. My body has difficulty differentiating between Joy and Sorrow sometimes. What is the phrase I came across last night? Oh, yes: Excess of Sorrow laughs. Excess of Joy weeps. William Blake. Boy, did he get that right. How many times have I felt the strong urge to quell a giggle at a funeral or weep buckets over something so beautiful, it hurt? I look at my son and ponder his own songs of innocence and experience. Sonshine, The Musical. For now, I have a front row seat and am thoroughly enjoying the show.


          
His Aunt swings by and, over another latte, we discuss what she's working on these days and my own future goals. As I nurse him, he falls asleep in a sunlit halo. Today I have decided to write more often. As often as I can. And add some photos, some colour, to the stories I'm sharing. I figure practice will make perfect. Someday. And I need all the practice I can get. With this wee bundle of mine filling the bulk of my arms and my days, I aim to write at least once a week, if not every day. It's a start. A tiny goal. A first step. I wonder when he will take his. Each day, I place him on his tummy and he strains to crawl. He has learned to turn himself over or move himself around in a circle. Forward motion he has yet to master (something I am only beginning to master myself since leaving my common-law marriage and the rut, the stasis of it). We learn to move forward together, my son and I.



The sun shines again as we leave my parents' place, a brief visit once the car is fixed. Clouds in the distance promise that we head home into yet another snowfall. The expanse of rural sky gives the added benefit of watching weather approach, sometimes tentatively. At other times, menacingly. Each time fascinates. Something I will miss. I throw another log in my woodstove to build the fire up and take a photograph of the front yard turning white at dusk. The tiny squares of the screen door produce the effect of a photo taken a century ago. In a farmhouse as old as this, it suits the mood perfectly. Pathetic fallacy. His little mouth turns toward my heart as we settle for the night with the ghosts in, what is now, a ghostlike landscape.


Music: Both Sides Now, Joni Mitchell

Snowflake

The sky was so grey this morning. Then came the first, real downpour this spring; sounded like an army of watery soldiers marching across my tin roof. I paused, transfixed amidst the disarray of the studio space under renovation, imagining the crib against the wall, listening. The deluge made me want to strip my clothes off, layer by layer, and go stand in it so my skin could recall the last time it was touched.

Just now the sun came out and it was the first time baby moved inside me all day. I was watering my plants as the last of the snow melts outside my side door. The windows needed this cleansing. I moved closer to the pane, wondering when the robin will return to where she’s nested above my side door these last four years.

Looking through the glass sparked a flashback to that second night I stayed with you last December. Remember the size of the snowflakes? Like golfballs drifting down. I’d had a bath in the early evening and was lying with my feet up on your sofa, my iPod echoing in the semi-darkness, when you returned to the apartment. The first thing you did was cross the room to open the blinds. You called me over to the window then and we stood looking up to the sky and onto the street, following their descent amidst the traffic. Your hands were deep in your pockets and my heart was high in my throat. They were so goddamn breathtaking and, recalling another wintry night far in the past, I fought a sudden rise of tears, my eyelashes blinking them back.

The snowflakes looked solid, they were that big. Their size made them appear heavy, less fragile somehow yet impossibly floating with their weight, so quietly and softly. It was like we were standing in this gigantic snowglobe: a souvenir from Vancouver. And that’s just how my heart felt. As though it had been inverted (like a silver claddagh), turned upside down and shaken into a million ice crystals dancing all around us. For sure it was falling as gently, silently, steadily as those flakes; the tiny hairs on my neck rising, anticipatory, timorously reaching out to the close proximity of your t-shirt, the skin of your arms, as I stood nervous and speechless, my mouth a little dry.

Did you know that snowflakes aren’t even white? They’re clear. Just the light, the way it hits ‘em, gets diffused by the hollows within the crystal. People talk about how perfect a snowflake is but actually its flaws cause the light to shine white and sparkle like a diamond. Its incalculable, tiny, crystalline imperfections enhance its beauty. The things I imagine doing with you, to you, are as innumerable and varied.

And it's this reverie that causes my fingers to ache with the memory of the silken smoothness of your back as they slide down the cold glass of my door, still a touch of this past winter clinging there. Hiccups begin in my pelvis. It's not a euphemism. But it feels like a little heartbeat down there, reverberating with the rhythm of your own fingers' caresses. I look at my hands. How many weeks before they draw this little one to my breast now, the pulse of the umbilical cord slowing before it's cut: less than I can count on these fingers against the pane, guaranteed. Seven weeks? Five? Eight, maybe? I remember how baby kicked when you warmed my feet with yours under the sheets that night. You don’t have to talk to me about water and longing. ‘Cause lately I feel like crystallized H₂O, like one of those snowflakes we witnessed the second-last day of December: floating around in space, not knowing exactly where I’ll land with the delicacy of all my womb carries, the frailty of my heart. I feel a little afraid of the heat of your breath fogging the window, emanating from your skin as I drift down through the sky. The stars, where I began this journey, seem so far away up above...

I wish to gather the courage to say just how I feel:
‘Cause I really don’t want to disappear. I don’t want to melt away.
Unless it’s on your bottom lip. Your tongue.
What I want is for you to come outside onto the street and open your mouth along with your heart. Open wide, ‘kay? And catch me.

Catch the one-of-a-kind, hexagonal symmetry of this love and swallow its perfection, its imperfections whole, so its light can diffuse, dispel the dark places and shine again from within…

Music: Chasing Cars, Snow Patrol;
I Remember (December), Lisa Hannigan and Damien Rice