Winter Of Love

She loved me with all she had, it’s just she didn’t have a lot.
When we talk about love, we talk about it growing, blossoming, blooming; but these are summer words. If we want to talk about her love, we must use the vocabulary of winter.
Her love was a tree with bare branches. It stood, solid, taking in all the goodness from the soil that was our life, to strengthen itself. It offered nothing in return; no gently uncurling leaves to give shade or shelter, no perfumed clouds of blossom to feed the bees, no lusciously ripe fruits for the harvest. This tree offered only its presence, a shelter in the time of a storm - unless the wind swayed it, and exposed you to the elements.
In the moments when I felt her love, the world was touched by magic. Have you ever been the first to awaken to the world cloaked in snow during the night? Have you felt that hushed majesty, the glory of the normal transformed to the extraordinary? How blissful were the smallest things, when they came with a moment of her approval; made only more precious by the certain knowledge that it could not last.
Winter is beautiful. It is crystals of ice, sparkling under the distant sun. It is a sky of burdened clouds, each un-shed flake refracting the light, sending it bouncing off the mundane to make it marvellous. It is warm breath, condensing in great dragon-smoke plumes. It is sharp-edged shards of ice glinting on frozen ponds.
We can dance in a blizzard, walk briskly through the bitter wind, feel the crunch of frosted grass beneath our feet and know happiness, but the time will come when the chill reaches our very core; the time will come when we need warmth, when we need shelter.
The thaw came in slow, painful tingling at the extremity of my feelings. I worried, for a time, that the freeze had been too deep, that my core was permafrost. I had forgotten the purpose of winter.
Winter is a time to rest. In winter, hedgehogs bumble into nests moulded from grass and leaves, and sleep. Bees, too, retreat to the hive to feed from the honey they have spent the summer toiling to make. Even the soil is fractured by water, expanding into fingers of ice, breaking up the solid clod to prepare the earth for spring planting. Winter does not kill us, winter prepares for Spring.
My love is spring. It showed itself in tender shoots, nervously seeking out light and warmth. A meeting of eyes, a tentative smile expecting the wind to change, turn chill and stunt this wondrous new growth. Instead there was restless energy, warm rains of possibility and a beauty that took my breath away.
My love grew. It was not a static, frosted, thing but a love of twining tendrils and new growth. It knew no bounds, bursting in verdant greens to wrap itself around anyone, anything. My love expanded, my love hoped and yes, sometimes my love failed. The seeds of it were not tended, or the branches were too roughly pruned. Still it was relentless in its determination to grow. That is the purpose of Spring; to revive all that slumbered while winter held sway, to bring new life, new love into being.
She loved me with all she had, it’s just she didn’t have a lot.
It seems, though, it was enough.