There must have been more of it then — the snow. I remember garage doors avalanched. Gravel buried. Yards that melded one into the other on Van Dyke Road. (Aaaaah, the great white equalizer.) And maybe it was youth, or inexperience, or lessons yet unlearned, but I don’t remember ever feeling that we wouldn’t come out from under. Even as abandoned snowmen clung to life beside Spring’s marigolds, I believed in the warmth ahead. 

Perhaps it’s the reasoning for all the lights. On trees and mantles. Candles lit and windows outlined with blinks of eternal hope. I suppose we do everything to keep the warmth alive. We highlight memories. Not to relive the winter, but to point our way to summer’s embrace. To prove to our hearts, and mostly our minds (the heart is always the easier sell) that we can overcome. We can survive. And will. And WILL. 

It’s ironic — this urgency to rush the winter, when it all really goes so fast. To slow it down, I remember the boots tipped over on radiators. Scarves half frozen from breathless gasps captured in the cold. And I think, what haven’t I survived? What haven’t we survived? And I gather in the light — warmed in the “out from under” — and I am saved.