Winter

Winter in Maine.  Silent.  Mysterious.  So enchanting, but so harsh and unforgiving.  There are no excuses in winter, nothing to fall back upon.  You have either prepared . . . or you have not.  Mother Nature is merciless, as always.  But she is beautiful.

There is a secret about winter that not many people know, and those who do not know it will never know it.  It is a knowledge that comes from within, and no amount of words will convey its understanding.  There is no studying, no reading, no learning about this secret.

 

I stumbled upon it by accident.  I was cold and wet and hungry.  I was in darkness.  I was abandoned, and I had long since given up on the light.  I was dead.

 

I felt a presence, a silent pact, a wordless agreement.  There was a stirring.  Deep within the earth, a tiny seed--a universe unto itself--lay sleeping, dreaming.  Frozen and dead.  Like me.

 

And it occurred to me, I can’t say why, that this motionless seed would somehow burst forth with a mysterious energy I knew it could not possibly possess.  Yet.

 

I stood there in the dead of winter, pondering. And I knew the secret.