Winter Sun

Mid-afternoon, the sun already setting, one week until solstice.

The winter sun slants through the trees, casting long shadows. Walking up the stairs to her room, light illuminates the landing. Bright and airy, she can imagine for a moment it is summer, can imagine how the house will feel open and alive then. The problem with day after day of grey is that it starts to feel like it will be winter forever. She begins to believe she has imagined spring, imagined summer, that they are simply a figment of her overactive mind.

When her college roommate was ten months pregnant with her son, long overdue, she told her, 'I feel like I've always been pregnant. I can't even remember how it feels to not be pregnant.' She knows that once the sun goes down she too will forget the feel of summer, forget how it feels not to carry an extra weight, but for now she hold onto hope, sun soaked memories.
*

The next day is even sunnier, brighter than it has been in weeks. She exclaims to her friends, 'Look at how gloriously blue the sky is. I wish I could capture it and put it in a bottle, take it out and put it in my window at night to remind me what sun feels like.' They respond, 'How poetic.' The irony is she isn't trying to be poetic at all.

It's on days like this, when she feels her heart finally beginning to unclench and a surge of energy and enthusiasm rush through her, that she realizes she's only just surviving the rest of the time, on what she considers her 'good' days. Last winter she was moribund, limp, lifeless. The improvement between this year and last is the difference between sinking and treading water. She pictures a white-tailed kite, wings fluttering while it hovers in one spot like an oversized hummingbird.

Kite, n. lit. the hovering bird; a rapacious bird of the hawk kind: a rapacious person: a paper toy for flying in the air, so called for its flying like a kite. {A.S. cyta; W. cod; Bret, kidel, 'a hawk,' from cudio, to hover.}

She's neither soaring nor swooping downward, she's treading air, suspended in space.