Day 41: The Winter Days

Walking on the beach this morning is a paradox. I'm bundled up with goose down and layers, so warm I can feel the sweat on my back. The sun is bright, it's twelve degrees of clear salty air and the tide is going out, leaving slabs of frozen sand. Mickey slides across them, his legs going in all directions. Rich runs ahead, my two boys bouncing their energy back and forth as they weave across the sand to the rocky cove that we've claimed as our own. I poke at the frozen sand, pulling bits of nature from the ice. A smooth piece of sea glass, mottled and pocked with texture. A baby starfish, no bigger than a nickel. He is frozen and curled around himself, poor guy. There are shattered shells and sticks of driftwood. I want to gather them up, like we did in college, and hang them on a net. Forgotten pieces that will be remembered. But there's something about the beach in Winter that keeps me from stuffing my pockets. Maybe it feels like a crime scene, and I feel guilty tampering with the evidence of the Ocean's crimes against her inhabitants. Perhaps it's more like main street after a Hurricane and I don't want to be the one caught looting the grocery store. More likely, my hesistance to gather these strange and broken pieces is because they belong here. I want other people to walk through my cove and peer into these frozen sands. I imagine children holding up the starfish, asking how and why. We don't have to pocket every cool thing we find.

And it's the same with each other. Sometimes we need to love each other most through our Winters. Through the messy times, when there's spinach stuck in our teeth and whiskers sprouting from our (multiple) chins. When the pants don't button anymore and there's more gray than not. These are the Winter days, our Winter days. And I'm not going to mess with them either.