Mud Season

I've been meaning to keep up with this blog more than I've done since our return from the Bahamas. I'd blame my lack of posting on the general busyness of life since we got back, but if I'm totally honest, I'd admit that's not the full truth. In fact, I have long been plagued by a need to make everything I write for an audience as close to perfect as I can get it, and this urge does not translate well into quickly-written posts about what is going on in life. I'm going to attempt to get past that roadblock, though, and forge ahead by giving myself permission to write without constantly analyzing sentence structure and word choice. I can't necessarily get rid of the editor's voice in my head, but I can do my best to try to work around it.

Last Friday marked the first official day of spring (on the calendar, at least - the weather in Maine apparently didn't get the memo), so I've been thinking about the seasons lately and how they can be a relatively appropriate metaphor for our experiences over the last six months. This is not the first time I've had such thoughts - I was particularly aware of the seasonal metaphor in the early days of our grief, in part because of the way summer came to such an abrupt end on the day Noah died and was born. The day before had been a perfect late-summer day, with clear, blue skies and warm sunshine. The clear skies continued through the night, showcasing the full moon as we drove to the hospital, though at that point I was too focused on the pain to give the night sky more than a passing glance. By the time we left the hospital 18 hours later, it was like someone had flipped a switch - the sky was cloudy and the temperatures had dropped dramatically. Summer was over, and so were our days of happy ignorance. We held the memorial service for Noah in an outdoor pavilion four days later and the biting wind reminded us of the finality in summer’s departure.

As I've considered the weather as a metaphor in recent days, I've decided the summer to fall transition doesn't truly capture what we've gone through. More accurately, our experience was like enjoying a perfect, carefree summer day and waking up the next morning to find subzero temperatures and a howling blizzard that has damaged our house, knocked out our electricity and left us clinging to each other in an attempt to find some sort of warmth. In the early days, the primary goal is survival, but eventually the electricity comes back on and we’re able to resume some activities of “normal” life, working around the damage we’ve sustained. It’s still winter, though, and spring seems like a distant dream as we bundle up in heavy clothing, plod through snow drifts and navigate ice patches. For us, winter started September 16 regardless of the beautiful colors and occasional warm breezes that insisted we did have a fall in 2008.

Now, I think our experience and the current weather are lining up again. Mainers call this time of year “mud season.” The high temperature for the day has started reaching about 35 degrees on a fairly regular basis (with the occasional 45-degree day thrown in there just to get our hopes up) and the slightly warmer air has begun to melt the layers of snow that have been piling up for months. The result is slowly-expanding patches of wet, muddy ground covered in brown grass and interspersed with slowly-diminishing piles of dirty, gray snow. Mud season isn’t particularly pleasant, but it brings with it the knowledge that the worst of the winter is over and spring is in sight. We’ll certainly have more cold days to endure before we get there, and we may even get another snow storm, but the cold will not cut as deeply, and the snow won’t last long.

I am in an emotional mud season. I have made it through the worst of the deep winter, and on most days, I am anticipating the hope and promise of a coming spring. I still have cold days when the happiness of spring seems far away, and sometimes it still snows in my world, but the pain of the cold is less intense, and the snow quickly melts. I look back on the winter and am amazed at what we’ve come through, and I thank God for giving us the strength to survive. I look ahead to spring and pray for patience as I wait for it to arrive. And I sit here in mud season, thankful that at least some of the snow has melted.

The writer in me is not satisfied with this post, but looking back at my first paragraph I’ve decided to just let it go and throw this out there. I don’t have time to hone each post into perfection, and perhaps some of the raw honesty would be lost if I did.