The larks trilled their cries that
Nested in my ears in birdsong.

I saw the thaw of winter had begun.

Soon spring would rush in on her
Pastel heels bringing forth blooms.

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To read Linda’s bio and enjoy more of her verse on WIZ go here, here, and here.

the hand of winter stretched out
his grey gloves and poured snow
out of his pitcher it fell upon the
world in cold numbing waves it
washed away all the colors of fall —

it beat back my favorite lilies into
the hand of white dust like people
are prone to beat one another into
the dust for a sense of self worth. I
don’t understand why winter thinks

he needs to be such a bully he beats
his cold fiercely upon the land blasts
his wailing banshee winds upon the
zephyr and rips remaining leaf missives
from trees with such force they yelp.

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To read more of Linda’s verse on WIZ, go here and here.

I watched as the white of snow
starched the earth clean of sins —

like the Savior washed me white
by his blood.  It seemed a stark

contrast of his shedding white for
red and the earth shedding scarlet

for white, but I think He favors the
irony just as much as we do. I stood

in the bone numbing cold of winter,
letting its reflection embrace me tight.

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To read Linda’s bio and more of her poetry on WIZ go here.

In the tar-like black sky
structures float like ghosts
through the illumination from bulbs
hovering like flying saucers over
the road. No heavenly
luminaries accompany me on this lonely journey.
Only those cones of light brighten the route ahead.
Nevertheless, I must persist.
I am a modern Hebrew
fleeing the Egypt of the office, escaping to
the Promised Land of the field. There,
as I stand on nude ground,
a lunar face and stellar eyes will look
upon me from the depths of the universe
and remind me of the Creator of this grandeur.

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Ashley Suzanne Musick was born in Fountain Valley, California, on February 26th, 1989, and raised and homeschooled in Anaheim.  In 2010, she moved to southwest Kern County, where she lives and works on a farm and writes in her spare time.  You can read more of her verse on WIZ here.

In which I make my way into Crossfire Canyon and meet a wondrous bird.  I muse upon the experience of eye contact with other species, referencing N. Scott Momaday and Martin Buber.  I see the light, loose and free in the canyon–it’s beautiful. Part one here, part two here, part three here.

As I worked my way down the trail, I discovered that my right knee was finally healing from a months-long bout with tendonitis and perhaps nerve damage.  As recently as two weeks earlier I hadn’t been able to raise that leg very high, so I tripped frequently over stones in the trail or fell on my backside on that more difficult-to-negotiate rock outcrop down which I had to lower myself to get where I wanted to go.  But this time, no trips, no falls.  Still worried that I was inviting further trouble, I forced myself down the trail. As I walked onto an overlook I frequent to see what’s happening in the canyon below–whether or not cows are lounging on the trail, for instance–something fine happened.

A mature golden eagle flew across my line of vision, very close and nearly on the same horizontal plane where I stood.  I halted and reached after the bird with my gaze, wondering if it would do something I’ve witnessed several times since I began hiking in Crossfire Canyon.  Knowing that eagles can see our eyes far better than we can see theirs, I maintained eye contact, looking steadily at its head.  The eagle appeared to be fleeing in a straight line angled slightly away from me but then turned in a slow, tight arc and circled back.  I kept still, moving just my head to follow its flight and maintain eye contact.  The bird dropped in altitude and swooped in so closely that I could see its yellow feet and curled toes and talons tucked up against its body.  I heard the “whush whush” of its infrequent wing beats.  The eagle circled six or seven times, keeping me at the center of its flight.  During its last couple of passes, I remembered my manners and removed my hat so that the bird could see my entire face.  After another minute or two of what I supposed to be eagle-style, close-in inquiry, the bird spiraled north along the cliff faces.  It rose above the rim, disappeared, and I was gone to it.

What was the bird’s intention as it regarded me from its wheel in the air, holding me at the hub of its interest?  This episode was the third or fourth time I’ve met with eagles in this slowly turning fashion, eye-to-eye, spinning in an orbit of mutual encounter.  As the eagle left, I felt soothing effects from the bird’s attentions but avoided the temptation to think of it as awareness of, sympathy for, or interest in my suffering. Nature is not sympathetic, like a kind nurse.  It’s ready to make hard use of me at the least lapse in judgment. Were I to fall to my death from the overlook, that same eagle might not hesitate to strip me of morsels of my remains–in particular, those very eyes by which we had spoken. What we’d said to each other I didn’t know, but it isn’t necessary to know.  In The Man Made of Words, Scott Momaday says of pictographs in south-central Utah, “We do not know what they mean, but we know that we are involved in their meaning.” The same is true of those moments of eye contact with other species–an event that occurs more frequently than humans realize because too often we look at other species seeking only our own images. Animals are all the time looking at our eyes to judge our intentions or to express concerns or interest. The philosopher Martin Buber understood something about the quality and intensity of animal eye contact, saying, in his remarkable treatise on relation, I and Thou, “An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language.” He goes on to describe what he thinks an animal’s gaze means:

The language in which [the mystery of becoming] is uttered is what it says–anxiety, the movement of the creature between the realms of vegetable security and spiritual venture. This language is the stammering of nature at the first touch of spirit, before it yields to spirit’s cosmic venture that we call man. … Sometimes I look into a cat’s eyes. The domesticated animal has not as it were received from us (as we sometimes imagine) the gift of the truly ’speaking’ glance, but only–at the price of its primitive disinterestedness–the capacity to turn its glance to us prodigious beings.  But with this capacity there enters the glance, in its dawn and continuing in its rising, a quality of amazement and of inquiry that is wholly lacking in the original glance with all its anxiety. [Speaking of the cat] … The animal’s glance, speech of disquietude, rose in its greatness–and set at once.  My own glance was certainly more lasting; but it was no longer the streaming human glance (pp. 96-97 in the 1958 Smith translation).

Animals as small as hummingbirds and lizards have engaged my attention by way of their gaze touching mine.  I wouldn’t presume to fix and so impose myself upon the meaning of such encounters, but I do know that during that moment of contact, fleeting though it may be, that creature and I are involved in something. In the case of this eagle, were I dead and my eyes fixed, its interest in them would be of a different and, to our thinking, brute nature. But we were both alive, looking across at each other, the eagle aloft in its element and I rooted in mine.  I’ve seen, I think, how golden (and bald) eagles display anxiety.  They catch sight of you and rise quickly into the air well out of the reach of both your weapons and your eyes.  I don’t think this most recent encounter had anxiety to it, though there might have been a tension between us, an uneasiness braided up with the magnetism of curiosity.  And though the eagle’s interest was not sympathetic, I might risk calling it “considerate” in the primary sense of the word “consider”–”to contemplate”–and maybe, too, in its possible root sense of searching the constellations (sider, sidus) to determine position and calculate direction or to glean intimations of other kinds of relation from circling fields of stars.

The eagle gone, I returned to the trail and continued down, pausing now and then to watch the few leaves remaining on cottonwoods ripple in cool breezes running up-canyon. The low-angled, late November light flickered sharply on the trees’ scale-like leaves like sunshine on wind-ruckled water.  When cottonwoods sport their autumn regalia–full coats of yellow, heart-shaped leaves all a-flutter in the wind, sunlight flowing over the tree like firelight over gold–I feel a spike of pleasure, hard to contain.  Something about how cottonwood trees’ leaves glitter when they’re all stirred up with breezes puts my mind in a prickle.  Even when the trees’ plumage is sparse and turning brown, like it was that day, there’s a kind of native beauty to how sunlight and currents of air play around the largest of Crossfire Canyon’s trees.  If I had not needed to portion out my time, I could have spent an indefinite amount of it standing there mesmerized on the trail, lost in the light fantastic of wind-shimmied cottonwood leaves.

This time of year, mid-morning light, wide-angled as it is, shines with brief intensity.  In only a few hours the west canyon wall would sheathe the sun.  A shadow would begin to form on the stone, almost as if seeping from the rocks.  It would lengthen, darken, spread toward the ground. A chill would set up in the shadows while the east wall and its talus slopes and bench remained brilliantly lit, the stones seeming to stand up on their shadows and the juniper and piñon pines taking on a polish, a forest of glowing detail and eye-straining intricacy.  Winter dusk that falls early upon low ground in late fall and winter will gradually fill the canyon wall to wall, while up on the mesa daytime blazes away a few hours longer.

But at the hour I was there, autumn light glazed both of the canyon’s sandstone faces.  Just at the rim, the ripest blue sky, a broad vein of turquoise bluest were it appeared to just touch the skyward stones and the canyon’s tree-line fringe.  I’ve never, ever gotten over the color of this planet’s daylit sky–that blazing blue.  It has never grown old. And here, at the November sun’s downward slide toward winter’s solstice, that cool but deep blue went in at the eye and provoked a physical response, a warmth that ran deeper than a blush, throat-down into the upper chambers of my chest.

To read part five, go here.

I spent the rest of that night struggling to keep my head and to work up plans to get Mark the help he needed, even if he refused it.  The next morning, while he still slept, I rose early and scrambled to discover our options, making some phone calls.  The PCP wanted me to bring Mark to the emergency room for a CT scan in case he’d suffered another stroke.  A stroke could account for such a radical change in his behavior.  With as many CCMs in his brain and brain stem as he has, the possibility that yet another malformed vein had ruptured or begun seeping was significant.

But a phone conversation with the manager of the local clinic sparked sudden insight that rang jackpot bells.  I told her that I’d only ever seen Mark behave like this when he’d begun a new medication.  “Has he started a new medication?” she asked.  “No,” I said, but her question prompted a few facts to drop into place. “But a month and a half ago the dosage of one of his old ones was doubled,” I said, realization dawning. I’d forgotten about the dosage increase.  A cardiologist Mark had visited had increased the previously prescribed dose of a drug that Mark seemed able to tolerate. I thought that might well be the cause of his latest personality bump, but I needed to talk him into meeting with his PCP to find out for certain.  I told the clinic manager I would try to get him to come in as soon as I could manage it.

I happened to be walking by the bedroom when he shuffled out.  I paused to appraise his condition.  His aspect was completely different; he looked like himself rather than a paranoid king. There was pain and confusion in his eyes when he looked at me, but I saw with relief that he looked at me, not at a heartless Jezebel. His first words, in familiar voice and much changed from the night before: “I’m sorry, honey. You don’t deserve this.”

“We both know this isn’t about what we deserve,” I said.  We’d talked about this: Nothing either of us had done during our lives separately or together could account for the outrageous degrees of hardship we’d faced since shortly after marrying.  The idea that we had “earned” our flamboyant state of affairs by doing this or that or by not doing this or that was meaningless, as were platitudes like, “God never gives you more than you can bear.”  If indeed God was authoring our unlikely story, he had certainly provided us more plot twists than many people would find believable let alone bearable. For whatever reason, the cosmos has gotten into the habit of dealing us ridiculously rough blows. If we went by the popular “you get what’s coming to you” model of justice active in many cultures, only a pair of heinous criminals could have behaved badly enough to come to such punishing conjuncture. But both of us are actually pretty nice people, if I do say so myself.  No–something else was at work in our lives, something we’re still seeking words for.  But “just desserts”?  Huh-uh.

In Christian scripture, Jesus devoted himself to upending this take on “fairness” rooted in the eye-for-an-eye economy born generations ago as the Law of Moses.  Its narrative continued to be used to shore up legal and religious justification for judging, shunning or killing the “not us” (folk not of the tribe) and, within the tribe, women, animals, and–when reasons seemed especially compelling–men, including Jesus himself.  Jesus brought to bear the entire rhetorical force of his Sermon on the Mount, including The Lord’s Prayer and The Golden Rule, against the Law of Moses, intent on breaking the stranglehold that this entrenched narrative had exerted for generations on a people he loved.  It had stopped their development and held their concepts of human relationship to the transactional thrift of tribal bargaining: “You watch my back, I’ll watch yours.” It prescribed retribution for all perceived wrongs, from those done you by others to those you did yourself and for which animals would be sacrificed in your stead. It enabled thinking that if something unpleasant happened to someone–especially someone you didn’t like or that you perceived as not serving the social or religious code the way you did–then he must have done something to deserve it, and God has had his way with him.

Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?

At every opportunity, Jesus flipped this social code prescribing negative reciprocity on its back, or else doubled it over on itself, turning it toward the good.  “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” And the wry, “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even to them”–an invocation of the Law of Moses meant to disarm the violent, dark side of the “an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” law of reciprocity set down for Israel in Leviticus.  Jesus’ bottom line on God’s own distribution of good: “… for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”  In other words, you can’t appraise the uprightness of another person’s soul based by whether good circumstances or bad befalls him. To Jesus’ thinking, the time had come for the children of Israel to grow up.

The negative-reciprocity model inherent in “you get what you have coming to you” was not unique to the Jews. Jewels of The Golden Rule shine in many cultures as teachers have tried to spark the imaginations of their people and open up their rigid narrative stances with words that, if the mind yielded to them, could clear ways to better prospects.  “Tsekung asked, ‘Is there one word that can serve as a principle for life?’ Confucius replied, ‘It is the word shu–reciprocity.  Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you (Analects).’” “Comparing oneself to others in such terms as ‘just as I am so are they, just as they are so am I,’ he should neither kill nor cause others to kill” (Sutta Nipata). “One going to take a stick to pinch a baby bird should first try it on himself to feel how it hurts” (Yoruba proverb).

Centuries and centuries of such teachings have not yet completely replaced the miserly and still common practice of accounting for others’ misfortunes by assigning them debts of trespass, either by way of public rhetoric or in the secret, self-sedating whisperings of the fearful heart: “He got what he had coming to him.  _________ has served him his just desserts.” (Fill in the blank with the name of the CEO of whatever transactional power structure you’d like.)  A contemporary, ostensibly equitable saying, “There but for the grace of God go I,” seems to acknowledge that another person’s misfortune could have happened to anybody, including the words’ speaker.  But the phrase “but for the grace of God” suggests that, through his grace, God has deflected what without grace would be deserved, or at least, not prevented.  A natural question that arises, then, is, Why would God’s grace intercede in one case but not the other?  Thus what seems on the surface to be an expression of empathy and an acknowledgement that misfortune may befall anybody actually separates those who receive God’s grace from those who don’t.  Better to leave out the “but for the grace of God” and say, “There go I.”  Better still: Where possible, turn in your footsteps and actually, truly, go with the Other, even into inhospitable, unexplored countries of the mind.

To his sorrow, Mark remembered everything he’d said and done the two days prior.  More importantly, he agreed that he needed to see a doctor.  That afternoon, I drove him to the ER at San Juan Hospital in Monticello.  He talked non-stop the entire, twenty-plus minute drive, expressing fears he was coming unhinged.  I said, just once, “I think it’s the meds, dear.” His psychological symptoms weren’t the only clues; he showed physiological ones, too.  He’d been severely congested, suffering a constant flow of mucus and saliva that made him cough and choke whenever he lay down. An inexplicable flow of involuntary tears ran from his eyes.  Our PCP did some research and discovered that at the higher doses that the cardiologist had prescribed, one of Mark’s meds becomes “non-specific” for some users, resulting in the drug targeting other major organs beyond the intended ones, including the heart and brain.  One reported side effects of the drug at those higher dosages was noted as a personality change.  The PCP told us that the heightened production of body fluids was the result of the burden the drug had placed on Mark’s adrenal system.

The PCP remarked that he’d never before seen anyone successfully “talk down” a person from the heights of what he called paranoid delusions and convince him or her to come in for help. I wasn’t sure that’s what I did; I might simply have accompanied Mark through the end of a manic phase and kept the process rolling when he came out of it. While the drama had been stressful and frightening, looking back, I see it as the destruction of a familiar home–settled ways of thinking–and, in its wake, the opening of a frontier with a “come hither” vista.  Exciting, after all. We pray for protection against such disturbing circumstances, or when we’re in them, we pray for delivery from them, calling them evil.  We amass wealth and power in an attempt to ward off destroying angels of every ilk. When I went down those stairs, I felt frightened and full of dread, afraid of the worst–whatever that might have been.  When I came back up, I was tired but awakened to yet another layer to life beyond what I’d seen from my previous standpoint until that older way of thinking buckled under the weight of another world breaking through what I’d thought to be a stable sky. That new view was  stunning, though I’d barely begun taking it in.

In his via dolorosa, Mark needed me with him, though he seemed to spurn me as unsuitable company. My uncertain but insistent presence affected the course of the journey.  Should we try to pray away such waking nightmares? Perhaps.  But if our prayers for protection are answered, what do we give up  in the bargain?  Whatever drug therapies or other treatments may be found for mental illness, sure progress rides on the depth of our willingness to join ourselves to persons squirming in the grasp of such powerful circumstances.  It isn’t just for the sake of the mind struggling to find balanced expression of its differences, but for the sake of those of us abiding in the cozy stability of our “normal,” chemically consistent, cerebral hemispheres.  If we label the experiences of the brain variable folk as “faulty wiring” or “meaningless suffering,” we may well be missing the invisible door in the wall of our own demarcated thinking that opens onto greater prospects for the human condition.  What prospects might those be?  I wouldn’t risk limiting them by saying.  Let’s just get through and see what our choices give rise to.

We stopped the medication and the most severe symptoms receded or softened, but only temporarily.  With this incident, it seemed that we’d passed a point from which there was no return. Over the next several months, Mark continued to present symptoms of rapid cycle, bi-polar behavior. None of these episodes reached the delusional heights of the July incident but each required my focused attention, often well into the early hours of the morning. At the end of August I started work at the local community college, now a branch of Utah State University.  I taught a freshman composition double class–three-fourths of which was made up of concurrent enrollment high school students (a new experience for me, and a mind-bending one).  Also, I began tutoring for a program on campus intended to increase the retention rate of its Native American students and help more of them reach graduation.  During this time, helping my husband navigate such choppy psychological seas reached nearly epic intensity. Nearly two decades earlier, when my special needs daughter was born with (unbeknownst to us) a quarter or more of her brain virus-ravaged and liquefied, I’d had to strip away cherished expectations, one by one, in order to fit through the barely visible opening between us and grope my way toward her in the netherworld where she’d been confined. My husband’s needs had begun running nearly as deeply.

He stabilized somewhat around the time of Sky’s death. I thought that maybe we’d passed through the worst and that I could relax a little.  But four days before the old dog died, my fourteen-year-old daughter–my last, big roll of the reproductive dice–collapsed suddenly in the kitchen.  Her thudding fall caused unwashed pots and pans stacked on the counter to rattle and silverware in drawers to jingle.  I crossed the rooms between us in seconds and found her lying on the linoleum, one arm outstretched in front of her, her legs folded back. She opened her eyes and blinked.  “What happened?” I cried.  “I don’t know,” she said as she sat up slowly.  My husband and son heard the commotion and converged on the kitchen.  We helped her up and led her out to the couch where we could sit her down and examine her.

That night Mark and I sat up ’til four in the morning talking, worrying that my daughter’s inexplicable collapse recalled some of his symptoms.  While not very much is known about the dozens of malformed blood vessels scattered throughout his brain and knotted into his brain stem, doctors informed him that he probably had a genetic form of the mutation and that his children had a fifty-fifty chance each of having inherited his condition.  I didn’t know if I’d be able to handle it if my daughter turned out to have CCMs, too.  Or my son. My special needs daughter–her brain had already experienced terrible destruction.  Overcome by fear and weariness, I said to Mark that night, “Every hope I had for my life is gone.” “Then we must find new things to hope for,” he said. We didn’t know whether or not our daughter’s losing consciousness signified an unwanted inheritance.  But the extravagance of our circumstances during nearly twenty-two years of marriage has conditioned us to expect extremes.

Then, of course, the old dog died.

So as I left the yard on Thanksgiving morning, seeking something in canyon–a glint of insight, maybe, or a meaningful, even if slight shift in perspective–I forced myself to walk past Sky in her winding sheet.  I touched her.  “Good-bye, old dog,” I said, patting her body.  The walk to the canyon felt unmanageable, an act of foolishness inviting further disaster.  Yet I pushed into the fear and made myself do it.  You never know.  Something bad could happen, but then something wondrous might happen, too.  This is the risk we run with every choice, including that routine decision to drive to the grocery store three miles up the road.

To read part four, go here.

We’ll breakfast at Las Brisas when we’re gray,
Discussing all our commonalities
And differences, admiring the breeze.
We’ll chatter and remark about the way

The rocking eucalyptus branches seem
To hammock threads of morning sun along
The coast. Pale clouds will sift to butter-cream
And melon, swimming through a blue sarong

Of tinctured sky. I’ll scan the beach and sea
Where I once played in tide pools as a child,
And you will say: The waves are much more mild
On Devon’s shore, I really miss Torquay.

I’ll point to where the purple mussel shells
Are found, then Catalina’s outline might
Appear beyond the shoals of blue-green swells.
We’ll venture down the path and look for white

Sails cutting southward, tilting toward the shore
Where long ago we bathed and sunned before;
And like two cockle halves worn from the weather,
We’ll linger by the oceanfront together.

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To read Karen’s bio and more of her verse on WIZ go here, here, here, here, and here.

It’s here I pause with each December, where
the snow-trimmed walls of timeworn brick align
beneath the windowsill and winter’s bare
limbs bend beneath a delicate and fine

glossing of frost. It’s here I garner all
my thoughts of months gone past, beside the sheers
and yellow paisley chair. A woolen shawl,
a pearl and knit of smiles and raveled tears,

is wrapped around my shoulders. Nothing speaks
but morning’s melting icicles and wind
that steals the breath of graying skies. The creek
is frozen into timelessness and thinned

with dying grasses every shade of brown.
I take my stock of daisies dried and pressed–
my verses, scratched impetuously down–
time balanced here on its mid-point of rest.

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Karen Kelsay has been published in a variety of journals including: The HyperTexts, The Flea, The Raintown Review, The New Formalist and 14 by 14 Magazine. She is the editor of Victorian Violet Press, an online poetry magazine. She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee.

How ugly you all are,
An all-over ugly!

Iris bulbs unearthed and scythed
Of top leaves,
I lay your twisted, tuberous
Bodies across a gutted paper sack
And take a moment to grimace
At your grotesquery.

Dirt clings to your stringy reaching roots.
Not even warm water and bleach
Can pretty the rough hide of your skin.
Poor horrid hags!

But wait—don’t droop,
Shrivel dry in shame.

For I know your secret.

You keep it like a locket,
Or maybe a pearl,
Deep in the water of your flesh—
A tiara of petals, jewels of silk,
A blush pressed within paper wings.
Each spring, you rise
Slim-necked as swans and slender-leaved
To curve rainbows into blossoms.

Yes, majesty resides in these lumps,
These commoner dumplings—
Children of the coronet.

Who would guess such a spectacle
But those who’ve already seen
The princess curled within the peasant—
The goddess in the hag flower.

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Sarah E. Page graduated Cum Laude from Brigham Young University with a B.A. in English in 2007 and is pursuing her Master of Science and certification in Secondary English at Southern Connecticut State University. Her poetry has been published in Noctua Review, Mormon Artist, Inscape: A Journal of Literature and Art, and included in the anthology Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-First Century Mormon Poets. When not scribbling novels or taking pictures of the ragged aster and other weeds running rampant in her garden, she enjoys getting lost on long walks in the Naugatuck State Forest.

It snowed today, for the first time. October 6th.

When my family moved to southeast Idaho, we knew that Winter was one of the by-products we were choosing. That “W” is capitalized, because winters here are real winters—you couldn’t survive without shelter. In Utah Valley, where we’ve lived the last ten years, you likely couldn’t either, easily… but there’d be a chance. Some random steaming garbage pile might keep you warm at nights if you found yourself homeless.

Not here.  We now live in Idaho’s Siberia. You’d think that, farther north in places like Sandpoint, it would be much colder, but no. The carryover from Washington state’s more temperate coastal climates makes the panhandle and other, more northern places a much easier place to grow things like tomatoes, for instance.

Here in Idaho’s Siberia there are miles of landmass and ridges of mountains to keep us from any friendly ocean breezes. In January it dips down toward negative twenty. And the winds are to be reckoned with—tearing in from the southwest, lifting sod off the fields before the ground freezes, withering the branches of any non-hardy fruit tree.

You plant your Polly peaches northeast of your house, here in southeast Idaho. The Honeycrisp apples and sour pie-cherries and, perhaps, the pears and plums might survive (all these are currently imaginary—a vision dancing in husband’s head and mine.) But not the peaches.

Our new home is hyper-insulated. Six-to-ten inches of polyurethane foam keep the elements away, and our body heat, so far, has been enough to keep us toasty and warm, even at that lethal six-o-clock hour when bare feet hit concrete floors and children shiver through showers.  But it’s coming. I know it is. My Viking blood is waking up, warning me, prompting me to drag out the giant tupperwares full of snow rompers and wool socks and mittens and hats and thermal underclothing.

We have neighbors close by who warned me that the key to life in our new little city is to “live it up in the summers and fall. Take every second you can and enjoy them… because when winter hits, everyone shuts themselves indoors. You don’t see anybody. And it drags on so long… the snow. The cold. The isolation.”

I asked him, don’t you go out to play in the snow.

He shrugged. “Yeah. But it gets so cold. Cross-country skiing and sledding just aren’t fun in below-freezing weather.”

Of course, he’s part Samoan and part Jamaican—he’s not used to this. Well, neither am I; I grew up in Northern California. But my Viking ancestors will jeer at me from the other side of the veil this winter if I don’t make the attempt…

Winter and I are going to be friends. I’m determined.

So this morning when the first snow started slanting down, soaking our alfalfa field and bringing out the sweetness of it’s purple smell and swelling the gutters with puddles, I shook it off. I  piled coats on my kids, snapped the baby into her fleece bear-hoodie and we walked to our homeschool co-op.

On the way home, two of my children slogged through a puddle. They were chattering by the time we got home and whimpering a bit. They will learn about winter, that the friendship has boundaries.

I fed my kids lunch and made my year’s first pan of cottage-friend potatoes, the most wintery of foods. My husband came home from work tonight and spent eight hours prying the lid off the boiler that heats our house and examining the rusty innards. I sense    already that his friendship with winter will involve more of a wary respect. And I admit I’m nervous. For me, friendships can be awkward at first. I get overwhelmed. I have my moments of despair: Did I say the right thing? Did I do something that revealed too much of my vulnerability, too soon?

Today I watch the snow fall through the big French doors and the windows that look south, east and north from our kitchen/dining room. I pretend nonchalance and think of the flakes as gifts. I allow the excitement to well up inside me at the prospect of four-foot drifts, of building a sled hill in the backyard, of cross-country skiing on the groomed trail by the icy-jade river that runs through our town. Of family snowball fights and cozy evenings cuddled around a TV screen watching movies that aren’t too scary but are scary enough to send my five year old shuffling to our room in the middle of the night, asking to be kissed and tucked back in.

We chose winter, and so winter will be a highlight of our year. We will make friends with winter. I’m determined.

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Sarah Dunster is an award-winning poet and fiction writer. Her poems have been published in Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought, Segullah Magazine, and Victorian Violet Press. Her short fiction piece, Back North, is featured in Segullah’s Fall 2011 issue. In addition, Sarah’s first novel Lightning Tree will be released in spring of 2012 by Cedar Fort. Sarah has six children and one on the way and loves writing almost as much as she loves being a mom.