It started to snow on the same day we decided to decorate our gingerbread house. As I sat at the dining room table with Leith, listening to Christmas music, watching him lopsidedly pipe icing and randomly stick candies and chocolates onto the house, minute flakes of snow began their meandering, lackadaisical summersaults from the sky. I’m not sure what caught my eye first: the huge maple trees’ limbs dancing in the park across the street or the flecks of white that went whirling around those limbs. Which ever it might have been, it all made me smile.
I got up from the table and left the child (and gum drops and marshmallows and gum balls and chocolate chips) for a few minutes. Everything has been so hectic and topsy-turvy lately and those brief minutes standing with my forehead pressed against the cool glass of the window were just what my whirling brain needed. I watched as the flakes grew larger and flew with stronger and more determined force around the neighbourhood. They never touched the ground, those wee flakes — they whirled and danced and flew and went up and down but never landed. Landing would surely mean melting and they were not about to turn to spots of water on my watch. Oh no.
My breath steamed up a small, dissipating circle on the glass pane as I stood there, hugging my chest and looking outside. I don’t know why these few moments meant so much to me, but they did. Maybe it’s the tumultuousness that has surrounded our lives for this past year. Problems with family, difficulties with friends, issues with co-workers, conversations with teachers, troubles with students…all the stress and all the love and all the problems and all the work. I think for the first time in a long time I had a moment to myself — and I indulged in it — completely and utterly without the stress that has been caused by life unfolding as it wants.
Does any of this make sense? I’m not sure. Just needed to get it out, I suppose. Enjoy yourself…and if you are somewhere where it isn’t going to snow, I feel for you. I really wish you could have been there with me yesterday.