happy groundhog day. now shut the door before we all freeze to death!

i can’t quite seem to get this piece right, but in honor of groundhog day and it being friggin’ cold* this weekend, i’ll post it anyway. maybe some exposure will help me decide what it’s trying to be.

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the lake is partially frozen along the shoreline. it’s all shades of white and grey, and when the wind comes up the ice fractures into pieces and the waves move beneath, creating a rocky, undulating surface. the lake and sky blur white at the horizon so that there’s no clear delineation of where one stops and the other begins. snow has been on the ground for several weeks now. it doesn’t melt, just blows around and seems to evaporate, and then another short storm brings a fresh layer. the air is cold and dry and acrid under low-hanging snow skies. and yet, in the midst of all this winter, there is a subtle but perceptible lengthening of days.

each day this week we are gaining two additional minutes of daylight. already our days are nearly an hour longer than they were at our darkest point in december. i wake with the light, and in spite of the cold there are birds singing a morning song in the trees outside my window. when i cross the city on my way home at the end of the day, the light is draining from the sky and lights are flickering to life in the skyscrapers, silhouetted black against the pale western sky. by the time we reach the equinox in march, the days will be lengthening even faster, cresting at nearly 3 minutes per day. then the pace will slow even as the weather mellows and the earth tilts our faces toward the sun, toward a future of long summer evenings and the scent of sun-warmed earth, rising even above the noise and crush of the city.

in june the long days will peak and then daylight will begin to run back out of the hourglass, each season flowing like waves, cresting again in september before plunging back into winter.

the sine waves of temperature are staggered, so that the coldest days peak even as the days are lengthening toward spring; in june the longest days will mark the beginning of the warm season, but it won’t be until august that the sun really beats down, relentless, for that period of a week or two when it’s hard to draw a breath and we all think we might fry like eggs right on the sidewalk. by then, the cooling darkness of evening will arrive two minutes earlier each day, and the approaching fall days will be welcome.

in the past three days, three close friends of mine have lost friends of theirs, all to premature deaths, coincidentally perhaps, all to cancer. tragedy moves in sine waves, too. it crests and then ebbs back. our successes and our misfortunes are stagged, so that we can bear the weight of our sorrows on the backs of the joys. if we could graph our lives, would it help us bear the tragedy? would it temper the joy?

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*and by friggin’ cold, we’re talking windchills in the -10 to -20 category. we’ve moved to defcon 3 in the winter-clothing department.