The holidays are over. Now we’re here
amidst the candle stubs and bits of ribbon.
Perhaps this stillness is a new career.
–“January Song”, Catherine Abbey Hodges

Little Brother and I kicked off our week by falling down the stairs together first thing Monday morning.

As is customary during catastrophes (from what I’ve heard), those milliseconds contain all the time in the world for a series of thoughts. Mine were: What the hell happened to my feet? They were JUST UNDERNEATH ME. What’s going to happen next? How long before we stop falling? Then we did stop, LB bumping his head against a stair and my left side bearing the brunt of the collision, flesh on wood, and both of us screaming. I was thrilled to find that, in a moment of utter fear, my arm didn’t betray its load and I didn’t drop my child. But at the same time…really? This is how we’re going to start the week?

This period of time–the weeks from just after Christmas until spring hints at its arrival in bursts of warm weather and extended sunniness–feel like a party where the booze has run out. So, not a party at all. While the Christmas season leaves me longer-tempered and more joyful than typical, the Advent-less time after it exacts that price in spades, my temper whittled down to almost nothing and darkness, real and imagined, nipping at my heels.

It’s rough. It feels like a wasteland. Every year, The Husband will turn to me or text me or call me with a familiar refrain: “San Diego? Let’s do it.” And I inform him that while he may wish they all could be California girls, he married one who will never be, #sorrynotsorry. I’ve always felt a need to pay for the goodnesses I receive–see the first three decades of my life and its enslavement to religion–that has lately turned more into an enjoyment of life’s million little transitions from dark to light, difficult to…well, less difficult, broken to healing. Our journey with The Kid has been my trial by fire into a grace that plays itself out in long days and dark nights that lead to glorious sunrises, cycles repeated over and over so that the gifts become the refrain, always returned to, always with a source who is faithful. That faithfulness is the song that seasons sing, the death that leads to life that is an echo of grace’s narrative.

Doesn’t make winter shorter, but it makes it more beautiful for damn sure.

Sure, this is the time of year that makes us victims of bad weather calls and colds, of chills and struggling to put kids in coats and pull carseat buckles shut. Everything takes longer. Everything feels harder. But…

It’s also the time of year that brought TK’s surgery, which has brought him here: this level-headed (literally) boy who’s coming into himself every day–even the gray ones. It brings runs that start out bitter, with only a tiny flame of warmth burning from within, but that flame grows outward and has fueled my two good races and a hundred smaller distances that all lead to the warmth of home. This time of year brought a hospital and a halo but also healing. It’s brought the church calendar’s Scripture passage to my favorite one, which is an echo of an earlier one, so that it was preached this past week–horizontal mic drop and all–so that the echoes and the returns home continue. These are the gifts of winter that keep me from writing off the gray and cold.

And then there’s this–and the fact that there’s even a word for it, this recognition of the beauties of winter, the incomparable closeness and warmth that it gives? It just feels like another gift, another refrain of grace through the chill.

I drop TK off at school one particularly cold morning, LB bundled in the backseat, and it’s one of those mornings that just feels too hard–a lifetime before 9 am. Who can say whether it’s too little sleep, or too low of temperatures, or all of the above and more, but I feel the tears revisit, the fears that echo through my heart over this whole parenting thing, the harsh words spoken and short fuse blown. But in the cold stillness I can hear better, and every echo of mine is answered with a louder echo of truth: I hurt him. I HEAL HIM. I mess up. I REDEEM. I suck. I SAVE. And as LB and I head down the road of leafless trees, I think about how much more I can see through the branches now. About how, later when LB and TK and I are on a walk and summit a hill, the view is so much clearer than it is when it’s warm outside, and the colors sprayed by the dipping sun are somehow more beautiful now than ever, stark and real.