By choice and circumstance, I live in a state that has powerful winters. They are long, cold, and dark. The bone-chilling cold and ice, often for months at a time, greatly restrict my favored outdoor activities, which are my life blood. While I have developed some winter hobbies such as ice fishing and late-winter deer hunts that help pass the time and get me outdoors, they are just “kick the can” activities until the weather improves and I can be more active outdoors. Given my inherent melancholic nature, the winter season often leaves me feeling like there is an anvil on my chest that I just can’t dislodge. Difficult times, for me and my loving family. I’m glad they are patient with me.

Moving here was quite a change, having lived the first quarter of my life in the temperate climate of California. My boyhood home was in the Pacific Northwest region of California. Winter, if you could call it that, consisted of rainy days in the low 50-degree range, and overnight lows almost always well above freezing. There wasn’t a summer activity, save swimming in the river, that you couldn’t also do in the winter. They seemed cold at the time, but now as I look back from my perch in the Midwest, those California winter days were halcyon days indeed.

After moving to the Midwest nearly 30 years ago, late-spring and summer became my internal battery-recharge time. Every year, I record the first ice-free lake day, and start getting the boat ready for the water. I start planning camping trips, and the family starts the annual discussions of how to get together for Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, and the many summer birthdays that run in our family. Those turning-point weather days and fun family discussions give me wonderful thoughts of future new plans and certainly new hope every year, like a warm fire after a cold night’s sleep. The future always seems bright every spring and summer, and that light pulls me out of my internal melancholy like a lifeline.

But this year was very different. The worldwide pandemic closed the campgrounds and lakes until very late in the year. For much of the spring and summer, restaurants were and remain limited, and approved activities that have only just begun to emerge, are subject to the threat of new limitations if the pandemic numbers rise again. Strange times indeed, and they have wreaked havoc on my internal mood-clock. While the physical movements are the same, and one goes about their business and recreation largely unimpeded, the psychological movement has remained stagnant, at least for me. I need physical freedom, but also mental freedom, to think, plan, hope, and feel alive. The constant uncertainty this year and inability to plan and arrange future events and activities, has played tricks on my already OCD-impaired, melancholic self-analyzing nature. Summer has always been my time for all of the necessary filling of my tank, for the slowing of my thoughts and the speeding up of my physical activity to re-center myself. It has been lacking this year, and I have suffered more than a little, in the hope department.

There have been moments, however, that have held me steadfast. My kayak trips on the local lake of an evening after work, pointing the bow into the fading sunset before starting the rhythmic, almost hypnotic, paddle back to shore, continually renews me. Camping with the family, one of the first times in years we were all able to be together, was magical. There’s nothing like that first light over a campfire, waiting for the coals to heat the old-fashioned steel coffee pot, to calm your soul and free your mind. And of course tending my garden, which was quite bountiful this year, has as usual provided some much needed earth-based fuel to warm my internal fire in preparation for the upcoming winter. There is something about growing your own food, on your own land, with your own hands working the earth, that is very satisfying.

This year has taught me, more than in past years, to not count on the future, all things are uncertain at their core, and to find things in the present to keep your hopes for the future alive.

I am feeling better already. There are many more good days ahead before the first snowfall.

(c) copyright 2020 by D. James Clark – all rights reserved