To the Solstice!

Every year for most of my adult life I've bemoaned the wretch that is winter. I've done it so much that it became sort of a hobby, maybe even an obsession. But somehow something happened along the way. It still may be underway so I don't yet fully understand, but it's almost as if I took all that hate and boiled it down to a rotten core, condensed and tough and black all the way through. It became my old angry friend who always arrived at my door reliably uninvited. And I took it in and carried that stone in my pocket for a while. But after so long a time, there was nowhere else for it to go so I twisted it and commandeered it and like some kind of desperate alchemist I transformed it into some version of, dare I say, love. But a weird kind of love, a love bred from hate. Or at least tribulation and suffering. Maybe it's just an appreciation or some attempt at mutual understanding, if for no other reason that to feign acceptance and a last-ditch effort to deflect defeat.  YOU WILL NOT BEAT ME I LOVE YOU SO MUCH. That sort of thing.  But then I finally escaped the dementor's presence that is the eastcoast winter (lame) and winter became hardly a thing again. It's long and cold and snowy but it's not how it was. It's never how it was. The hate has crumbled a bit and blown away without me even noticing.  And I realize I'm left there with something that feels the most frightening of all-- indifference. 

So today I'm going to put my confusing feelings aside and propose a toast:

Raise your glass and join me now, 

woven armor on frozen brow.

I've suddenly burst into spontaneous poem,

for that confounding friend or foe

(which it is, only you can know)

who on this day December 21st,
for good or bad,
for best or worst,

I concede, (for weeks indeed,)

shall have a home.   

To the solstice!

p.s. I heard this song the other day and liked it a lot. I plan to play it on repeat starting January 1.