Grief and poor health and birthdays

These past five months have been very difficult. My Dad passed away last October and the process of dealing with his death has been at times, overwhelming. I have been trying to breathe through it, to allow myself to be sad and to ride with the tidal wave that is grief and not try to fight it too much.

                                     Acknowledge and move forward.

I have also been sick, off and on since before Christmas. It started out with pneumonia then I got better for a while and then end of January/beginning of February I came down with bronchitis, and I am just starting to feel like I have moved to the recovery side of things. It's very frustrating being chronically sick, I feel like I have fallen so far behind on so many things, so many projects have been sidelined and I have had to delegate my housework and make concessions as to what's most important and honestly I have just not had much motivation     (which also ties into the grief/depression I have been dealing with)



The first two weeks of March have been a major lift for me. The birthday week for two of my immediate family members and I, it is always a great pick me up to celebrate another year with them and I have learned to be truly grateful that I get to make another trip around the sun. Parties and cupcakes and friends and family, what a great antidote for the late winter blues.

When I was a kid I always remember it snowing on my birthday (March 8th). It always seemed prior to the day that Spring was just around the corner, and then bam! my birthday rolls around and snow. It never lingered, just hung around long enough to remind me I am a winter baby.

Winter/Christmas on the West Coast is a blessing and a curse.

I grew up with snow in winter. The first snowfall always seemed to happen right around if not ON Halloween and it stayed in some form or another until my birthday rolled around in early March.

As kids we spent all our free time outside, playing in it, we learned to drive in it, we hitched our dog to the sled (once) and she pulled us around the block. We built forts in it, even ate our lunch outside in it, and the idea of school being closed because of it? Never happened. It was magical.

Here I am now, 30 years later, sitting by an open window, on the 2nd of December, enjoying a cloudy and rainy, (but not unpleasant) 50 degree day. I now live on the west coast, just north of Seattle. I enjoy the weather here about 90 percent of the time, but there is something very odd feeling to me about December without snow. It is not a new feeling, I have been living on the coast in some place or another for about 13 years and I feel the same every year, the longing for ( just a bit) of snow. Sometimes my prayers are answered, and we get a couple sprinkles and we take advantage of it, but for it to last longer than a couple days is rare, even more rare is for us to have actual snow on Christmas Day.

This year I will hope, (like I always do) that it will snow on Christmas, so my kids, who own rain boots instead of snow boots can experience the same joy I had, to wake up on Christmas morning and experience the world peacefully blanketed in soft white majesty.

If not, we'll make some cocoa in the thermos, pack up the car, put on multiple layers of socks and our rain boots and go looking for some in the mountain passes, and enjoy the best of both worlds.

Don't go far off.

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

-Pablo Neruda