In The Country

The bus took such winding turns, our Saturday morning bodies queasy on unknown roads. It dropped us at a quiet intersection in an unassuming village: church, grocery store, coffeeshop, quiet. Another bus through sleeping countrysides, a waiting car, and we landed at the house at the top of the hill, with nothing but wide open space ahead.

The sea is beautiful this time of year, all grey and moody and inviting. At every turn in the weather, every glimpse of sunlight, it twinkles in gold and reminds you of warm summer afternoons and unending nights, of green, green leaves just aching to burst into being, of that special softness the air has when you bike ever so quickly through it on your way home at dawn. It makes you young, again.

Wine bottles emptied, one by one they lined the kitchen counter as conversation drifted through the usual stages of indecency and liberated laughter. I went outside for a smoke, sat in the dark silence and watched the embers glow, listened to returned birds tell their stories of travel and brighter futures. Spring is so close I can taste it. I forgot, again I forgot, how naively I abandoned the knowledge that this is the changing of seasons: that winter kills every last breath in you, it tears apart your defenses and extinguishes your sparks, and that spring always returns to remind you of who it is you are.

I can feel it, stirring my insides, waking my heart strings. Any day now, the long dark winter will be over, and I will forget there was ever night. Any day now, I will be alive.