A Winter to Remember

Last night, we took a walk outside. It had been snowing pretty seriously since early afternoon, and while what we really wanted to do was stay on the couch and finish our House of Cards season 3 marathon, I'm co-chair of a project at my synagogue and had to be there for a couple of hours last night. With six inches and counting of snow on the streets and no plows in sight, driving there was out of the question and it was just around the corner, so I had to walk. After blasting a path out of our house with the snow-blower, David decided to make the trek with me.

My street was completely snow-covered and utterly deserted. It's not a busy street to begin with, but with the thickly-falling snow, it was like a fluffy white blanket had been thrown over my neighborhood, and we were living in the silence beneath it.

We picked our way down the street hand-in-hand, sliding a little bit here and there and laughing while the fat flakes coated our eyelashes, slapped our cheeks, and swirled around us.

I guess I could say that I'm sick of winter. That I'm tired of cleaning off my car in the morning and of wiping up my salt-stained entry-way floors and of being so cold all the time and of snow in general. But last night when we were walking through our quiet, snowy neighborhood it occurred to me that I'm not really all that sick of it at all. In actuality, I'm kind of grateful for it.

Because this year, winter is an interesting time in our lives. In October, I found out I was pregnant, which was the beginning of a flurry of morning-sickness filled days and nights, anxiety filled doctors appointments where we sat in silence and hoped that we would still see a beating heart on the fuzzy ultrasound screen, and with each passing week a fascinating brand of hope and anticipation that this was, in fact, the baby that would be ours.

And then it got colder and the snow started to fall and we started sharing our news - first with family and then with everyone. And we started to feel more confident too. But the first half of pregnancy is a funny thing. Because even though the news was out and I was finally - mercifully - feeling better, there were still all the tests to contend with. The ones that every woman gets, that are completely routine, but that seek to unearth every single thing that could possibly be wrong with the baby you've been growing for months. And well, who can relax completely with all of that uncertainty going on?

But then the test results came back and everything is exactly the way it should be and now we find ourselves in what I have come to think of as the middle place. There are hard things behind us, and serious, life-altering change ahead, but right now, it is just us and the snow, and cold nights under blankets in front of a fireplace, and dinner together on the couch in front of the TV, and winter walks through our quiet neighborhood with red cheeks and frosty eyelashes.

Spring will be here before we know it, and then summer will come roaring in on its heels, and I'm looking forward to all of that, and everything that comes with it. But I know that, years from now, when I look back on this time, it's going to be the winter that I remember. Those days when anxiety was replaced by anticipation, and when we were still just two, living in this amazing now and dreaming and planning for the days to come, with the snow-blower growling in the background.

And I'm thinking about the days behind us and wondering how the ones to come will look, but more than anything, I am living here, right now. Because even in the face of the monster change coming in just a few months, these moments right now are still the ones that matter. And this is exactly where I want to be.