There are monstrous fat white flakes of white crap falling from the sky right now, and it’s the first day of spring. Not cool mother nature, not cool. Being a native Cali girl I naturally hate the cold. I transplanted myself willingly (not sure my head was screwed on correctly when I initially made that decision) to the East Coast in 2009, and I still have not grasped the idea that winter is a “nice” season. I don’t think that will ever happen to be honest, I’m generally a cold blooded person already. Not in personality that is, but in body temperature. Though I can have bouts of ice queen personality on occasion. My inner ice queen comes out usually when snow is falling (makes me cold and I hate being cold), when I sit on my couch for too long (I have always been an active person so stationary life does not sit well with me), and when I get irritated enough that I snap (that tends to end badly as my mouth sometimes says things before I can think and tell myself that speaking whatever that may be out loud is not a good plan.) My inner ice queen usually is at peace and willing to just chill in her own little space somewhere deep inside me, but when she does come out it is not pleasant. And winter seems to be her prime season.
Which brings me back around to it currently being the fist day of spring. Spring to me was always my favorite season because spring means my birthday, daylight savings time (more time to play outside with my ponies), and the approach of summer. The east coast has brought me to a new appreciation-level of springtime though because it means life and birth. I never quite connected spring to that when living in California because things come back to life after summer when the rain starts again. Out here though, spring means connection to life as the weather warms, as the harshness of winter disappears and the persistent chills leave my bones.
I have had two things stopping me from writing on my novels recently, one of those things has been schoolwork keeping me busy, and another has been a genuine lack of disinterest in the idea of using my brain. For awhile now I’ve been battling with myself internally, wondering why my inner ice queen keeps popping her head out and wondering why I haven’t been able to find the will to write. I love writing, I really do. But I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me…there had to be something wrong.
Then spring weather arrived about two weeks ago.
All of a sudden I have this drive to write. After some thinking, I connected the dots. Winter makes me shut down just like it does to the earth. It shuts down my mind, my pleasant emotions, my drive and passion, everything. All the things that make me write in the first place were shut down by the winter, and as soon as warm weather began to appear I felt refreshed and interested in writing. I saw sun-kissed daffodils popping up from the damp soil, the tulip poplar at the top of my driveway has buds bursting open to reveal pink and frost colored flowers, and slowly little emerald shoots of grass were pushing forth in my fields. The color is finally coming back to the world just as my creativity is coming back to me.
Then it snowed this weekend. And sleeted. Frozen, white, bone-chilling, stuff. And now my inner ice queen is still standing in my mental doorway, grinning like a loon.
