Memory Serves

Once upon a December's day - what? This very day, one year ago? You don't say. Once upon this very December's day, I sat in this same chair, at this same window, and I anticipated. I also wrote. It is inspiring to remember the kinds of anticipation that swirled around my mind in the days before everything came to a point. At the time I wrote this, I had four of them. Four days. Memory tells me they were good ones.

This time around, as I enter the flurry of the holiday season and as the cold weather works, as always, its imaginative magic upon me - two things ever at odds - I have new memories to ponder. Ella's coming last winter was as wild and unpredictable as it could have been. It was also more difficult and painful than I ever could have thought, but those particular memories are for working through on my own, in the quiet moments I hope to find amidst this month's chaos. For the moment, I look back again at a morning four days before she came:

In a Flurry

December 7, 2010

The weather forecast tells me it is nineteen degrees outside. By my calculation, it is the seventh day of flakes flurrying - or more - in the air. (The "or more" seems over for this round of storm, only remnants still covering this bit of Southwest Virginia ground.) The sounds emanating from my iTunes come straight down the line from this-time-five-years-ago, David Gray at his "Life in Slow Motion" wintry best. I have a snowy, upstairs view to the neighborhood, to the treetops, to the little nearby airport, and, of course, to the flakes that seem never actually to fall, but that swoop and dip and remain up here, in the sky, by my window, quickening my mind with excitable, swirly thoughts of imagination and possibilities.

It is winter, finally, again, and I am here and there, then and now. Both today and last winter (with its new novel ideas) and the one before (in Charlottesville, with gingersnap tea and characters fresh on the page) and the one before that (in Vermont, two feet underfoot of this fallen white stuff and snow shoes and those magic, pre-engagement days with Kenton) and on, and on: David Gray in Asheville five years ago and the birth of a seed of an idea for a book; here, today, in Blacksburg, and the book as it has been created thus far and lived and grown - now readying itself for a first-time winter season on the shelf, as another, newer life takes precedence. Here and there, back then and now.

What is it about this weather, more than any other, that inspires new thoughts and connects old ones? That fosters such fertile ground for the advent of living things? It is a mystery to me, this: every year, the death from off the leafless, brackened limbs proves a weak one; willingly or no, the stark-fingered trees perform but the gloried task of bearing up this lively winter magic, the lovely soft and cold pallets of white nestled so beautifully in the crooks of their black boughs and branches. I look out my window and I see it. There is something alive in this season of seeming death, and it quickens my mind, every year, every time.

This year, I am grateful for the early snowfall and winter-come, thankful it has arrived while I still have a few hours, days, perhaps weeks - but only, at the most, that - to accept this manna of imagination, this inspiration to create, as it comes. To hold it in the grasp of my thought for as long as it's gifted to me, till it melts away for a time into the next gift, another kind of life that will come to us in a flurry of unpredictability, to be held just as light-weightily, just as gratefully, as I must hold this moment of creative inspiration.

Earlier in the week - last week, actually - this poem on The Writer's Almanac:

Everywhere, everywhere, snow sifting down,

a world becoming white, no more sounds,

no longer possible to find the heart of the day,

the sun is gone, the sky is nowhere, and of all

I wanted in life - so be it - whatever it is

that brought me here, chance, fortune, whatever

blessing each flake of snow is the hint of, I am

grateful, I bear witness, I hold out my arms,

palms up, I know it is impossible to hold

for long what we love of the world . . .

It is winter, and I can - must - again create. What does that mean when a little being of nine months gestation, having been so kindly created inside me since the end of last year's winter, is about to be born out into the world? She gives a heave and tickles my tummy to remind me that she's on her way. I look out the window and think how the blessings that fall and bound about me seem, in this moment, happily, far too many. I'll spend this morning in the grasp of but one of them, in the hold of imagination, creating. I'll spend this day sinking my mind into the spirit of an imaginative abundance that flurries forth new thoughts and words, in the spirit of winters past. And then, soon, I'll spend the coming weeks holding a new winter's gift: that which seems impossible to grasp at the moment, a new life of a different sort.

The snow falls, the writerly ideas flurry, the baby girl pends. And "whatever blessing each flake of snow is the hint of, I am grateful, I bear witness, I hold out my arms, palms up." I am happy.

. . . I know it is impossible to hold

for long what we love of the world, but look

at me, is it foolish, shameful, arrogant to say this,

see how the snow drifts down, look how happy

I am. *

*"Manna" by Joseph Stroud, from Of This World. © Copper Canyon Press, 2009.