love

First it was a threat, an amber warning, and then, by 8am, a reality, falling in big soft silent flakes, from a sky that looked like my granny’s double damask table cloth. And every single flake is different- no two ever the same.

In no time the snow is over my boots- something I discovered fairly smartly as I rushed out to build a snowman. The first of the year. Even at nearly 60, snow people fascinate me. With our frozen fingers, we can fashion these crystals into a magical creature, letting our imaginations fly.

I read a book recently called The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey and it took me into a fantasy world of snow and trees and silence and magic. Even though the story is unbelievable, in that a snow girl comes to life, I believed it, because I choose to inhabit such a world where anything can happen way outside what is seen and explainable. Too many unexplainable things happen and not just to me. What I see, can touch, and explain, ends right there; it can never go any further, but if I turn instead to my imagination, there is absolutely no limiting punctuation whatsoever.

Secrets are funny old things. We love to have them for ourselves and we can hug them for days, months, even years and, in some cases, forever. When we know another’s secret, we have to watch ourselves carefully in case it rises in our throats and spills out in a tumble of words. Sometimes we are more than happy not to know another’s secrets, however desperate they may be to tell us. They can be a gift, or a liability, a delightful revealing of something we have always wondered about, or a heavy weight we are stuck with, now that we know the hidden truth.

Sometimes, in the early flush of a love affair, we can think we want to know absolutely everything about each other, but I don’t think that’s healthy at all. Someone once said that once we tell all our secrets, we are left only with their memory. We can no longer call them our own, nor feel that sense of mystery, like a butterfly in our hearts. I have many secrets and I am rather fond of them all. Nobody can tell me they are a lot of cobblers, because nobody knows them. Have you ever shared a secret and wished you hadn’t? The response was too casual, or too earnest and you didn’t quite believe your secret was that interesting. Or you might have been persuaded you were wrong, or not looking at it right and then you felt deflated like an old party balloon.

Keep your secrets, that’s what I say, and keep the mystery, for isn’t that what makes us interesting, intriguing, a someone who might suddenly disappear without stopping to tell you first? It keeps people on their toes being around someone who doesn’t lay themselves out like a map for all to study. I like to say I’m going out, without saying where to. It feels wild and exciting, even if it’s just to buy milk.

You never know where a snowdrop will appear in the wild, because you didn’t plant it. Nobody planted it.

Now there’s a secret and a half.