Snow Day

I was about to write a post about how last night (well, morning) I went to bed with joy in my heart because the ground had an actual covering of snow, my little Beetle was white, not blue, and I knew I didn't have to get up for work. When I woke after NINE glorious hours of sleep and looked out my sliding glass doors, there was no snow and the sun was peeking through clouds. Ah, the fleeting condition of a Southern winter. But now the air is completely filled with falling snowflakes, again, and it's not too cold to sit on my porch for a bit and just revel in it - it's so pretty. Dare I dream that it keeps falling... and keeps falling, and gives us another snow day? Well, I probably shouldn't. Being greedy. But it's even thicker in the last minutes that I've written this! And I start to brainstorm my trip to Colorado this summer - the power of association.

I watched that movie again last night, this time without wine (smart move,) and it still made me cry. So it's just what it is, I guess. A powerful little story that cuts right into my heart with little anesthesia. I have now cried three days IN A ROW. I melodramatically capitalize that phrase, because this is so very rare. It started with Sunday morning, when I went to church for the first time since December of 2006 (that's not a typo.) A guy from my small group actually looked shocked and said something along the lines of "it's different to see you in this venue", and I shamed him by replying "I don't have the mark of the beast, you know." But I digress - my friends were baptizing their son, hence my required-by-conscience attendance to church. They were actually the "sermon" of the day as the pastor interviewed them about their story as a married couple and the journey that took them to their son. There were lots of sniffles and wiping-of-eyes all around, because it really was a powerful, sweet, sad, and joyful story, and though I knew the story, I still sniffled along with the best of them. At the end of the interview, they played a slideshow of people in our small group in various stages of their journey with them, and I was in a lot of those pictures (YUCK), and the soundtrack was our friend A's song that he had written after my friends had suffered a miscarriage. It's about the small group, and he had written after the group had planted a tree to honor the lost little one, and the gist of the song is that at different times we are called to carry the light for our neighbor who is too burdened to carry it, to see the path ahead of them for them. At the point in the show when they are shown planting the willow tree - well, this was when the sobbing came for me, and thank God the lights were down in the room. It was the overwhelming sadness at their loss, but the sweetness of the rallying of community, and realizing that I, too, am a part of that same community, as little as I feel I belong (mark of the beast, remember) - I couldn't hold it all.

Well, I trust that crying on occasion is a normal, necessary thing to do. Maybe not when you call-a-friend-at-midnight-on-a-Monday-night crying - that's not so "normal," but it happens. And thank God for friends who answer, and listen, and don't judge too much. I hate trying to end my blogs. I'm ready to go, and I feel like I need clever closing, a circular motif perhaps, a joining or melding of symbols or thoughts from different strains of my blog entry... forgive me. I'm just going now.