It is an understatement to say I have a hard time with change. Adjustment to just about anything is slow and painful. (Well, not anything. I do love to move the furniture around.) Especially when the changes come in multiples - not good.
This past weekend the new Swiss student arrived. Roxane is her name and she is very nice and pleasant to be around. This arrangement is ostensibly to lighten my load and provide me with company, but it is also change adjustment someone new in my house and in my family. AND the very same day she arrived... the snow melted. All at once. All of it.
For just about everyone I know here in Western NY, snowmelt is to be celebrated. It means spring is (sometime in the future, after we muck through the season of mud) on its way. We didn't have a ton of snow this year, and much more cold rain than I would have liked, but the snow was enough that the rain didn't wash it away; it just packed it down and turned it into a kind of snow cement, a white covering over all the ground.
Snow literally changes the structure of our yard. There are shoveled paths where there use to be open space. Garden beds are covered over and cease to exist. Small mountains spring up on either side of the bottom of the driveway, mountains that are good for sledding down and hiding behind and bouldering over. Snow forts and snow walls are built, then shrink and shift and are rebuilt.
Then the snow melts.
The snow melts and the old yard is revealed. Hello garden. Hello dog poop. (seriously a lot of dog poop hidden under the snow.)
There's not really a way for it to happen gradually. One day the snow is there, and the next it is gone. The piles at the end of the driveways stay for an extra day or two (and the gigantic mountains in the backs of the parking lots could possibly stay til July), but all the expanse of white, the crunch and spread of it, all that has been visually stable for the past several months - it all just vanishes.
It's too jarring for me. I was not ready to be done with the snow. I am never ready, turns out. Nonetheless, the snow is gone, and a new person is here, and adjustment is hard. I spent the last few days in a dramatic kind of space, weeping and lamenting the change, though I have faith it will be great for everyone eventually. It will come, the settling. And then you know what will happen?? She will leave, and it will be change adjustment someone gone from my house and family, and I will fall apart for a spell.
This past weekend the new Swiss student arrived. Roxane is her name and she is very nice and pleasant to be around. This arrangement is ostensibly to lighten my load and provide me with company, but it is also change adjustment someone new in my house and in my family. AND the very same day she arrived... the snow melted. All at once. All of it.
For just about everyone I know here in Western NY, snowmelt is to be celebrated. It means spring is (sometime in the future, after we muck through the season of mud) on its way. We didn't have a ton of snow this year, and much more cold rain than I would have liked, but the snow was enough that the rain didn't wash it away; it just packed it down and turned it into a kind of snow cement, a white covering over all the ground.
Snow literally changes the structure of our yard. There are shoveled paths where there use to be open space. Garden beds are covered over and cease to exist. Small mountains spring up on either side of the bottom of the driveway, mountains that are good for sledding down and hiding behind and bouldering over. Snow forts and snow walls are built, then shrink and shift and are rebuilt.
Then the snow melts.
The snow melts and the old yard is revealed. Hello garden. Hello dog poop. (seriously a lot of dog poop hidden under the snow.)
There's not really a way for it to happen gradually. One day the snow is there, and the next it is gone. The piles at the end of the driveways stay for an extra day or two (and the gigantic mountains in the backs of the parking lots could possibly stay til July), but all the expanse of white, the crunch and spread of it, all that has been visually stable for the past several months - it all just vanishes.
It's too jarring for me. I was not ready to be done with the snow. I am never ready, turns out. Nonetheless, the snow is gone, and a new person is here, and adjustment is hard. I spent the last few days in a dramatic kind of space, weeping and lamenting the change, though I have faith it will be great for everyone eventually. It will come, the settling. And then you know what will happen?? She will leave, and it will be change adjustment someone gone from my house and family, and I will fall apart for a spell.
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