Winter Takes Its Fools

 Elk Under the Northern Lights cards and prints available HERE

Winter fools me every year, creeping in on the breeze of a silent night, like twinkly sugarplum fairies prancing past red and gold bangles on a scented evergreen. It stealthily carries the warmth of the hearth’s crackle to the soft blue candles in every window, and then tucks itself under the covers where I’m lulled to dreamland by a barely audible choir that sings of heavenly peace. The house is warm with pumpkin spice and the love of a man and two snuggly dogs. The ghosts of yuletide gatherings softly reappear. Mom and Dad are there, smiling as we open presents. Grandma is at the door with an apple pie. The snow comes gently falling. And once again I’m fooled.

Sometime during the night, my winter bliss is sucked into a polar vortex and I come out the other end of it a dried up, itchy, bloodless clump of frozen meat with icicles in my veins, barely functioning on the waning juice of a drained freezer battery.  I’m a dark and heavily robed scythe-wielding skeleton chipping away at the layers of an ice grave. But my arms are so heavy, so weak. And I’m so hungry...SO hungry. Ravenous….I’ll eat anything in sight just for the strength to tunnel out of this coffin of hell frozen over. But my arms and legs just get heavier, my mind anemic for sun, for hope, for just a flower…

What’s reality? Is it sugar plum fairies? I don’t think so. It’s bursting pipes, stomach bugs, and frozen snot. It’s the reduced visual field of a road-shit splattered car with exhausted windshield fluid.  It’s the biting gaggle of seasonal curmudgeons casting shadows across the wintry landscape of my mind.  It’s the nincompoop wearing shorts and flip flops on a 10 degree (F) day. It’s a frostbitten middle finger in the face of global warming.

It’s my own self-doubt that keeps me going, that says maybe this isn’t reality, maybe it’s just a snowstorm in my brain, a whiteout in my consciousness.

Against a backdrop of endless gray, a little girl holds my hand and laughs, catching snowflakes in her mouth. There are castles in the air but she can’t reach them without me.  “Please,” she begs, pointing toward the roof. I reach, jump, crackle and pop, breaking through my glacial tomb if just for a moment. I return with an icicle and hand it to the girl as sparkly sugarplum fairies dance in her eyes. A moment of winter bliss returns. And once again I’m fooled.