The First Snow & My Dad

I've always loved the look of snow on leaves.  It's as if they got sugar dusted.  As I get older my body doesn't like the cold much.  That gets more challenging each year.  I grew up in New York state though and winters there are hard.  It starts snowing in October and really doesn't stop until April.  I love the winters in Colorado.  There's a cold spell, then snow, then it all melts and goes away for a few days.  It's not the constant snow you get from the North East back home in Hornell New York.  In Colorado we're a bit south of that latitude.  I like it better in Colorado.  

I do miss New York sometimes.  I remember walking that one mile walk home from school and by the time I got home my wrists were red and raw from where the end of my gloves didn't quite meet the edge of my coat.  It was like that all winter there.  If you had a hood it was all the way over your face or you wore a ski mask.  Those were the worst!  You'd breathe through the mouth part and it would get wet from your breathing and then freeze around your lips.  That happened under the nose part too.  It was better than having your face exposed to the bitter cold.

Everyone looked like they were going to rob a bank.  It was kind of creepy but when you're face stings from the cold you don't care what you look like anymore or if it makes your hair look flat.  Thank goodness the hair style was long, straight and parted in the middle in the 70s.  It worked.  

My kids never did have to experience that.  They grew up in Southern California where it got cold in Winter but only really cold enough for a windbreaker.  We had Winter coats for them just so we could go up to Big Bear Lake or Arrowhead and play in the snow with snow dishes, once it got cold.  We did that a few times a year.  We'd pack up the car, drive up into the mountains and look for a good hill to sled down.  It was a lot of fun.  Everyone would get really cold but I remember the kids having a ball, so it was worth it.  They had the big red snow dishes with the handles on the sides that you could hold onto as you slid down the hill.  Then you had to drag it back up the hill to do it again.

My father did the full on skiing.  He took me out with him a few times but I wasn't very good at it.  I used to fall getting off the chair lift and embarrass him.  I was so scared of not making it off the chair that I would wait too long then push off too late and the chair would hit me in the rear and knock me over.  He'd just stand there shaking his head at me.  One time I actually skied into a bush and cut my cheek.  I got to the bottom of the hill and my sister Anna was down there waiting for us.  I told her how much fun it was and she looked at my bleeding face and said, "Yeah right."  She was no dummy, not going to do THAT.  

Dad was a phenomenal skier.  He used to be an instructor.  He lived in Greenland for a while when he was in the Army.  My father was always active and physically fit.  I didn't get his talent for sports but I had a lot of curious energy so I followed him around.  I wasn't the "boy" he wanted though.  I think a son would have been more his speed but he loved me and I did my best to hang out with him.  My mother and my sister were content to stay home and watch the snow with a cup of hot chocolate and cable.  I was somewhere in between that.  More adventurous but not quite the "camping" girl either.  Camping for me was when room service ended at midnight. 

Dad grew up in New York state, Watertown actually.  That's up by the Canadian border.  We lived in Camp Drum (Fort Drum now) where it would snow in feet not inches.  I remember driving home with my mother and the snow drifts were so tall that it was like driving through a tunnel.  We lived there for a  year while my father went to Vietnam.  It was called Waiting Wives Quarters.  We lived next door to the nicest family.  I can't remember their names but they had a son around my age.  They got the horrible news that the father had been killed in Vietnam and they moved shortly after that.  That's what happened when the father of the family wasn't coming home.  We lived in fear of those people coming to our little duplex to tell us something that would change our lives forever.  I was 11 when we lived there.  Anna was 12.  We were in junior high school at Carthage Central School.  Those were some of the coldest Winters I remember.  Up there in the Klondike.  hahahaha

Dad did come home.  I remember seeing him walking towards us in his khaki uniform.  It was surreal.   I just remember how handsome he was.  That I was crying and mom was crying and so was Anna.  We all didn't know if we would ever see him again and there he was.  It was incredible and we knew how blessed we were to have our dad come home because so many kids we played with weren't that lucky.  As a kid you just want everything to work out and be okay in your family.  You want your world to make sense.  This was the second time he'd been to Vietnam.  The first time was when I was 7 and in the 3rd grade in Watertown New York.  Both times were very hard on my mother.  She did such a great job with us and did her best not to scare us or say or do anything that would make things upsetting for us.  One testament to her courage is that I don't remember feeling like dad was in any danger when I was little.  She did that for me.  I know that now.

As a parent we can only do so much but protecting our children from what hurts them is so important that you sometimes sacrifice your own needs to help theirs.  Even doing that isn't enough when they're learning things like love doesn't last forever.  It can but sometimes it doesn't.  I was grateful that my parents stayed married.  They had hard times but they endured.  They made it to their 50th anniversary and dad died the following June.  That was 12 years ago.  

Dad made winter fun.  Skiing and snowmobiling were just two of the things we did.  Every year on the first snow I think about all that.  I wish my kids had been able to go snowmobiling with him.  I wish a lot of things but I think about it on days like this.  Watching the white snow swirling around outside blowing the tree branches around.  A haze of white outside the window.   I miss him.  Especially today.

Change

It happens every year.  Change.  Something different creates a new perspective.  Even if it's just the colors of the leaves on the trees in Fall or the new grass that is bright green in Spring.  There have been so many changes since Taryn left.  So many layers of change.  I do the best I can with it but I still struggle and want to stop the world sometimes.  I want it to give me a chance to catch up with all the change.  I sit here and still feel the sting in my eyes and nose. I watch these beautiful leaves that have been green all summer turn a deep shade of red.  It's beautiful.  All of it.  

I've been listening to The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and it helps.  His words are soothing. His voice is a sound from my childhood.  He's German.  The accent will always resonate inside me as something I knew first.  I was born in Germany.  I heard the German language before I heard English.  It's home to me.  It helps me love his words and his thoughts even more.  There is so much to understand in this life.  So much to let go of too.  We develop these patterns of thought and behavior young in our childhood and spend most of the rest of our lives trying to reshape them into something we can live with.  For instance there's no point in disliking people for hurting us.  They're following their patterns and sometimes have no choice because they are so unconscious in their lives.  

The good news is we can change our patterns.  It takes a LOT of effort and awareness.  That's what the book is about.  Moving from being stuck in the past to truly being able to live in the moment.  Appreciate what is happening in your life right now, right this minute, and realizing that now is all that matters.  Not what happened in the past.  It's given me a lot of peace.  I've been able to see my experiences for what they are.  Learning tools.  That's all.  Just tools.  They don't define me.  Not anymore than the leaves outside are defined by what color they are in any given season.  They are still leaves.  They change but they don't change what they are.  I can change all sorts of things about myself and still be me.

I took a class in high school that I really loved.  It was art.  We worked with clay and a potters wheel.  I loved the smell of it and the feel of the wet clay and how I could mold it so easily before it was baked hard.  It couldn't be broken when it was pliable and soft.  It had this wonderful scent that filled the room.  I would walk into that room and take a deep breath of that smell.  It was the smell of creativity.   The smell that anything was possible.  

I've always loved art.  I went to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena once and saw some of the most beautiful paintings in the world.  There were sculptures by Degas and cubist paintings by Picasso.  It was so incredible to stand there and look at these priceless works of art, made by great masters.  Centuries later there I was looking at them with tears in my eyes.  Artists know the scent of creativity.  They can't live without it either.  

We are each a masterpiece.  A work of art.  Constantly changing our colors and molding the clay until the day when it is done and we die.  That's when the work of art is baked and hardened and what we leave here is our monument and put in the museum of memory.  I love her painting.  Her sculpture.  I look at it every day.  It's inspiring and beautiful and fills my eyes with tears.  She did good.