| First East Coast Winter I don’t really know how this all happened. I look out my window and it seems like someone else’s life, someone who lives on the East Coast where it snows. But wait - I live on the East Coast where it snows. It’s so beautiful I can’t hardly stand it. The brilliant white makes everything seem Divine. But wait - everything is Divine. It’s as if by placing a blanket of ivory over the cars and trees and same old mundane stuff we look out our windows and see everyday, God reveals to us how not mundane but how precious everything is. Perhaps this is why people in Southern California are crazy. They are never reminded of the perfection everything holds. Oh sure, they’ve got beaches and palm trees, but those NEVER change. They look the same no matter Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall. The palms do not turn yellow and fall in October, nor do the desert shrubs fight their way up through the soil in May. It’s always sunny and it’s always Southern California. And although we, (and I will use the word "we" now), must toil through the changing seasons, reminded of our smallness compared to a seasonal wind or and unseasonable storm, some how the transformations make it all so dear. For a whole string of days or weeks everything is a whole different color, or a chorus of colors. For a month, the scene outside my window will look fundamentally different than it will in two months. Isn’t that amazing? All of God’s creations and all the silly stuff we accumulate and park outside our houses, they mutate into various entities, depending on what is falling from the sky or has sprouted from the soil. Isn’t that amazing? Perhaps it’s because this is my first East Coast Winter that I am so romanticizing the frozen water as it lands on cars and porches. But I hope I do not lose it. I pray that if it is the Universe’s plan for me to stay here, that in years from now I remember how I feel at this moment. I pray that I will always allow the miracles so apparent in the dramatic shifts of weather to remind me of my smallness. I pray that I never hunger for the continuity of Southern California. And I pray that Spring comes in good time. |