Winter of the Mind
By J. R. Burns
It was a cold crisp morning that I would never see. The kind of morning where breath hangs in the air and all noise is muted by the snow and ice smoothing the world. I would have liked that morning, as the sun would cause the ice to sparkle, and causes mists of snow as the trees unburden themselves before another cold night.
I had lived in the mountains for years, the twilight years as we had come to call them, before my wife passed away. But I guess there is no justice in a story began at the end, so let’s begin at the beginning.
I was born in the evening of a balmy spring day. My mother had become used to children arriving in their own time, as I was the third of four to bless my family with noise. Three hours and I arrived, no worse for the wear.
The first few years flew by, I was growing and changing so much, and my mother had my temperament pegged even then. She wrote a note to be in those early years that I would only get to read once she left this world, but that will come in due time.
My mother stayed home with us kids, on our five acres of land, when I was in my third week of kindergarten I broke my arm trying to dive into the above ground pool, and instead of in I ended up out. I still remember the dull pain to this day, though I no longer feel anything.
Those five acres I grew to know as my own paradise, my refuge from school, and eventually girls, and life expectations of others in general. I learned so very much in that laboratory. We’d build race tracks for the good ole Radio Flyer Wagon; we even made a mud hot tube after school one afternoon when the heavy rains had caused the spring to flow. Freedom and fantasy were the air and food of my childhood. But we all grow up, at least in the physical sense.
In middle school and high school girls entered the picture, more as a backdrop and an unattainable companion whom I longed for, yet could see no logical reason why. I dated a couple times, had my heart broken more than a few times, and learned the dance.
College began one brisk fall with a church service and seeing my Father cry for the second time in my life. The first couple weeks were rough as I broke up with my long distance girlfriend of over a year. Then I was truly on my own. I loved and lost and lost again. My mother passed away my sophomore year and I was never the same again. A summer later my Father was remarried and my would be wife entered my life. The Christmas my Father shared a note written to me when I was weeks old, telling of the man I would become, of the way I would draw the world in through my eyes and let it seep into my heart. A year and a half later I was engaged to be married and my Father was in the process of getting divorced. My older brother was married and sister was engaged and the world was spinning faster.
I graduated from college, barely, and begun my journey of life with no direction and crushing depression. Then, as often things do, they got worse. My soon to be wife temporarily called off our engagement, I had a summer job that all but robbed me of any sense of self-worth, and life seemed as dim as could ever be.
I survived that run in with death, but just barely, and the scars would follow the rest of my life. Two years later I was married and beginning a new position. A new hope arose and fell again within months, depression dogging my every step, and unhealthy workplace and I was almost down for the count. Then a strange thing happened, I lost almost everything and was freed. I quit my job, and began loving life again.
Years past and we moved from this place to that. Jobs came and went, children came and left. And then it was just the two of us, wading into the warm waves of our sunset years, approaching the twilight. She was first to go, she always had to be first, both in life and death. The habits I abhorred in life were endeared in her deafeningly quiet absence. I returned to the small town of my birth to live out my days, to be in the land that had formed my soul even as my body grew weak. And so on the cold night, somewhere around 3am, with the bitter wind causing the house to shake, and the soft dance of the fire with its crackling… I let go and was…. Something else… and I never saw the morning.
