The Four Seasons

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Clearly, my psyche needs them.  Each season in it’s turn, a delight.  And I can say this after being waylaid for four days in our attempt to fly home from Maine to Texas.  It does amaze me, that in 2013 I was able, thanks to my daughter’s family relocating to the University of Maine, to capture each of the four seasons in their height and glory. 

A grandson born in the peak of spring, with lupines and lilacs in full bloom, a chance to pick apples and pumpkins in the fall, and now a world so covered in ice and snow as to feel like we were on a set for the filming of the Snow Queen. 

 And of course, the summer season is covered here in Texas some 8 months of the year.  How thankful I am to have experienced all four, when my biggest lament of moving here was that I would have to give them up. 

As I write this, the “Polar Vortex” that has delivered winter to the doorstep of many who had no desire to revel in the cold, is just retreating.  Of course, the cold caused damage, and even some deaths, so perhaps this isn’t the time to write about the joys of winter.  Apologies to your southerners who are still trying to thaw out.

But Maine is all about winter.  Perhaps it isn’t always this way, but these last two years have served up the whitest of white Christmases and Currier and Ives scenes abounded.  This year, snow was followed by ice, which was followed by snow and then more ice and then more snow.  There were days when the high was -7 so the ice that coated the trees and made it look like a crystal forest wasn’t melting when we were there.  Thanking God that we didn’t lose our electricity, and that the wind didn’t pick up which would have turned a crystal forest into a broken one, we could just marvel at the beauty of it all. 

I do have a feeling that my daughter will be ducking under this birch tree for months to come. You see birches lining the highway and the fields bowing to all that pass, and it will be interesting to see in subsequent spring visits, how many manage to straighten up again, and how many will continue to be bent reminders of their winter load of ice and snow.

These ice-covered apples will eventually fall and provide food for the foraging deer and buds coated in ice will hopefully be none the worse for wear when spring comes. 

Returning to Texas, through snow and ice and cancelled flights, we arrived to 18 degrees and weird person that I am, I thought that was a good thing.  To be catapulted through the seasons is disconcerting in my book.  Now I can look to a slow warm up and fool myself into thinking winter will be melting into spring.  Yet, I know for my daughter that will be months and months away.  And with three children under 5 that need to be bundled, mittened and booted, the delight in winter has probably waned already, but still, this Nona is thankful to have been a part of it, even if just for a few weeks.