There’s been something different about this unrelenting snow. Maybe it’s my age and I’m getting sentimental. But I just can’t get mad that it isn’t fully spring yet.
It was a late night pause at the Taco Bell drive through when I had my a-ha moment. Which, admittedly we are doing way too much these days. Between running a business, wrangling my four kids and managing a household all too often dinner falls by the wayside and I end up quietly waiting beside this lonely drive thru window. This time it was probably the first few moments of silence I’d had all day.
As I was patiently waiting for my chicken chips I looked up at the sky — pitch black and so cold it seemed ominous. Somewhere cascading between the neon lights across the street and that darkness a few rogue flakes started to fall. Far away from the torrent winds of the blizzards we’ve had, and nowhere near the romantic dusting that comes just before Christmastime. Something different was in these flakes.
As they fell they just sort of floated around me and stayed suspended in the air, never quite seeming to land. It was a dance of snow, somewhat of a last hurrah.
The girl in the Taco Bell window knocked on my window and broke my concentration on the snow.
*Knock knock knock* “It’s gonna be a bit we’re just waiting on your fries,” she said and handed me another bag. As her window was closing I could hear her say, ‘Ugh I wish it would stop freaking snowing already!”
I unfurled the paper bag, looked back at the twirling flakes and fell back into my space-out.
As I was sitting there in the long-desired silence of a late April snowfall, eating my chicken chips, I started to think about the business of life. The busy-ness of my life. And how I am not getting any younger.
Maybe it’s those mid-life analysis you get to while in your thirties — who knows. But for a moment while I was watching those flakes I started to see the possibility that I myself will someday become like late falling snow.
All of us will if we are blessed with a long life. At some point, our busy-ness comes to an end and the spring snowstorms of our lives become perhaps an annoyance to those around us.
I started to wonder if someday, when my hair is the colour of these snowflakes, will my last hurrah be loathed by people longing for spring and youth? Or will those last moments in my older years be honoured? Will I eventually be treated like late falling snow? Or will I be given permission to dance across the night sky like these floating flakes surrounding me?
I couldn’t help but think of my grandmothers, and wonder, if they were dancing out there among those flakes. And I decided in that moment that I would always honour the late falling snow — and never complain about it again.
Because I couldn’t help but fall in love with the vision of my grandmothers dancing among those snowflakes. And I couldn’t help but see myself someday in that vision. I couldn’t help but fall in love with that version of myself, god-willing, that is yet to come.