December Weather

Deep in my veins runs Yankee blood, and that blood loves to feel cold air. My senses love winter. To smell the smoke coming from a chimney, mixed with how mittens smell when drying on the radiator after a long afternoon playing in the snow. I love the sound your footsteps make when you walk down a snow packed pathway. And nothing...nothing at all tastes as good to me as hot chocolate with a spoonful of Fluff on top after shovelling snow. Yet, with all this love of snow, I am living in a state that has very little snow in winter, some years none at all.

I come alive in cold weather as if the summer heat had cast a sleepy spell on me, with the first cold north wind waking me.

This morning as I took my little walk, I watched three squirrels playing chase around the trunk of the big old pecan tree next door, and watched the December sky change by the moment as the upper winds tossed and turned the clouds. My eyes dictating my next step. Mistletoe in two trees, too high up to pick...a sigh. How pretty it would look hung up with a bright red ribbon in the doorway of the dinning room. Emery steps out the back door to see what I am looking at, of course I tell him that the tree has mistletoe in it and how pretty it is. He smiles, takes me in his arms and kisses me. It is mistletoe ! We smile, mine that contented, "aren't I lucky" sort of smile, but his smile is all boy, the smile you might find on the face of a 13 year old boy that stole his first Christmas kiss. I love it. Our bodies seem to be growing older but our hearts are ever so young, at times feeling uncomfortable with how our minds and joints do not seem to be in one accord. We don't leap fearlessly from rock to rock when we are hiking now a days, but show caution. I haven't skipped across the yard laughing loudly as often, not because I can't, but because I think about that bursitis I had in my knee a while back. Just writing that makes me want to head outside and skip anyway. Why not !

This December weather, cold this morning, makes me want to make snow angels and skate on a pond, but alas there is no snow and the only ice I know close by, is in my freezer.

I am thankful for a life that is uncomplicated, free to dream, to think, to be myself. To be able to have the time to watch squirrels and kiss under the mistletoe with the man of my dreams. To let the wind carry my laugh and to head out the back door and skip across the yard, forgetting altogether that most 56 year old women don't do such things.

Life is abundantly wonderful !