Winter Beginning

Unsure where to start, I begin with winter. Looking back on the last three years since I started my first blog I see three years of lifeless survival. My travels were like brief winter getaways to take my mind off the hopelessness of it all. While searching for a job I found myself manipulated, fired and discarded. I am not sure what I was looking for, and I was never sure whether I was going the right way. It was blind endurance which ended with me giving up.  I gave up traveling; I gave up teaching; but I couldn't give up writing. Because, as I remember my winter, I realize that it wasn't the travel, but writing about it,  that got me through.
So it was necessary to start a new blog, to continue writing about my settling into a rural Minnesota community and leaving my passport in a drawer for a while.

Although winter had brought an end to so much I had cherished, I no longer see the need to fly across the ocean.  Like much else, I just couldn't face it: the constant changing of jobs, cultures and addresses.  As to making a home, I didn't know how to start, and resigned myself to renting a furnished place to which I had no connection.  But as I dug in under the covers, family rallied round. They urged us to move back into the house we bought when the boys were young.  On a rainy weekend in October, my in-laws both moved us in and the old carpets out. We started with bare floors and a fire burning in the hearth.

I was in favor of leaving most as it was, neglected and depressing, until summer... or until we knew for certain we would be around for a while. But family ignored my quite sighs and tackled the grounds. Whole trees were pulled up, branches cut back and the flower beds weed-whacked. Then the reminder of all that had been was carted off to be burned. I saw little point of the endeavor, and little hope that the landscape would change much for the next six months. I was told, "you don't want that sitting around."
There is so much I am ashamed of, so much to look back on with regret. But that is a sign of the end of one's life, and doesn't encourage a fresh start. I just didn't need all that sitting around to keep reminding me of what went wrong. Winter became a clean slate, a new horizon to be explored.
I had nothing else to do but watch: watch the walnuts fall, see the new colors in the leaves, watch the tractors work and the corn pile up; attend a school football game; wake up to snow

and watch the snow drift across the drive; identify the birds on the feeder and the animal prints through the snow; watch the fish houses set up on the frozen lake; attend a Christmas concert; allow family in to both knock down walls and roast turkeys.
I learned so much from November to April: to be still, to breathe, to allow others in, to not be afraid of the future. This period of forced inactivity brought growth inside while outside nature was sleeping.

One day I looked out on our back yard, on the ice and bare ground, and saw some green.  There was something growing in my flower garden! Putting on my boots I waded out through the mud to find the first yellow-green shoots of a lily pushing up.  Winter was not over, and the poor things had to put up with being covered with another foot of snow.  They survived and brought life to an ugly bed.
These lilies have several names: resurrection lily, surprise lily or naked lady.  I am not responsible for planting them, but have come to be fascinated by their habits.  The long green leaves come up in early spring similar to daffodils without flowers. By June they have drooped and started to disappear completely.  The leaves rot and seem to melt away, leaving bare soil.  Weeds and other perennials crowd in to claim the space and I spend weeks pulling up thistles. 

At the end of July, when I have decided to dig up the useless bulbs, a shoot appears poking up through the dirt.(Hence the name 'Resurrection lily') Like mushrooms,  they appear with no leaves, just a stalk and bud.  One day there is nothing, then the next a two foot shoot stands tall as if someone had come over night and planted a flagpole.   The pale bud opens to reveal several delicate pink trumpets.  The naked ladies sway to and fro between the other blooms of the garden.
Just as winter is not the end of life, spring is not the final conquering of death. Life and beauty, nature and mankind, pull us on in a never ending cycle of quiet loss and  glorious growth.