sledding

you're all complaining about winter and dark dampness and the smell of exhaustion in the air, but the snow is so beautiful when it piles up deep, buries our stairs, flies sideways through the wind so that everything is white on one side and bare and lonely on the other, trees standing tall and skeletal against the orange sky in the park. today my stomach and my arms are sore, my elbows aching just a little, but it's all worth it for those two hours we sledded down that hill, yelling and falling and running back up to the top, calf-deep, snow down the backs of our necks, to do it all over again. the best is not the steepest or the longest downhill slope; the best is to find a flattened, faintly reflective groove where others have sledded before, and it's smooth sailing from there. we made our own paths, too, between deep snow angels where i chased the sled as it rolled downhill and i sank in up to my knees, held it in front of my face to keep the shards of sleet from my wind-burned cheeks.

and then we dive into big bowls of spicy soup and dry clothes, march back out through the snow to one place after another and maybe winter's just the coziest time of all.

now it's february, and there's so much more of the cold still to come that i'm not aching for summertime yet, but i'm remembering how i wasted a lot of last year's sunshine by working two, three, four jobs, avoiding the people i loved, shutting myself away and aloof and rolling my eyes at every party i went to. remember, in the summer i hated hipster dance parties and all the raucous sweaty joy of the places i used to love. remember, in vienna, those dumb giddy thoughtless nights were what i missed. there has to be a compromise here. sometimes excitement feels empty. sometimes, i think, there seems to be a divide between things that are meaningful and things that are fun and things that are neither but make the time fly faster. (since when do we want time to go so fast, anyway? i want to wallow in each moment for as long as i can.)