Memories...all alone in the moonlight...

Sometimes I am seized with a yearning for place.  It is often a composite landscape composed of real and realer than real components.  Usually this homeland of the soul is outside, artic cold, wooded, snowy.  I feel invigorated and at peace when I am able to conjure these "memories".  Sometimes, they are actual memories of growing up in the Adirondacks and especially of my dog sled driving youth, but even then the feeling of being on the sled gliding through the woods was so familiar and reminiscent. I have lately taken to checking the Lapland Lake website for the current weather conditions. (This is a place I worked one season) I want to say this activity leaves me fraught with homesickness, but it is something even more.  I feel the same longing when the wind blows into me a certain way, or the naked branches of winter trees rub limb against limb or the silent falling of the snow creates a hush over the landscape-even in the city. Some of the works at Dog Star Creations have the same effect. The poetry of Frost and Mary Oliver can drop me to my knees in a snowy field at dusk when I am sitting at my computer in July. What is this cellular pull?  I don't know, but I do know it makes me heartsick to imagine a world without ice and snow, frost and breath hanging in the air like smoke from a peace pipe. I fear that my daughter will never know this beautiful, bountiful winter scape...or even come to despise it as so many people claim they do. So for now, I will continue my love affair with winter  and revel in it's pleasures and pray for its survival and the survival of my remembered home.  I plead you do the same.