Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 4, 1994 TAG: 9404080007
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ADRIAN BLEVINS-CHURCH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It was late January, and already I had been driven down, like many people I know, by the winter. I thought I would become murderous if one more meteorologist announced a coming storm. For me, because I have two children, snow and ice and below-freezing temperatures constitute more than just an inadvertent day off. Such weather promotes the tempers of the people with whom I live. Such weather lessens the control I work to maintain over my days by throwing the uncontrollable into the wheel of care I try to keep - and must keep - moving. If public schools are canceled, I have an immediate - and formidable - child-care problem. If it is too cold for my sons to play outside, I have the problem of trying to keep entertained two small persons for whom a house with eight rooms is nothing but a prison cell in which the two will, like caged animals, fight with one another until someone draws blood.
Then there's the issue of food. If I can't get to the store, what am I going to feed these frothing things weeping in the middle of my kitchen? And these problems do not even begin to confront the conflict of my own apathy and depression. In addition to feeling weighed down by obligations to love, protect, feed, transport, clean and educate my children, even during ice storms, I feel a sadness bordering on insanity. This melancholic stillness is made all the worse because I cannot name or control it.
Often, because I want to know who I am, I think about my parents. I want to know, like many do, who my parents were when they were my age. I want to know what they did when it snowed, when my sisters and I were stuck in the house and they had limited food in the cupboards. I have this weird idea that understanding their struggles will help me come to terms with mine. When I ask them questions about those days, probably because they long have been divorced from one another, they shake their heads in silence. Either they cannot remember their daily lives 20 years ago, or they choose not to. This turns me back to gray-colored memories I sometimes recall only in dreams.
In these dreams, my parents are giving parties. My mother is dressed in an elegant gown made of some mysterious soft cloth I can still feel against the side of my face, and my father is perched on a bench in the summer light of the kitchen. He is playing his guitar. The house is full of their friends; people are in every room of the house at 65 E. Main - even in the bathrooms and in my bedroom. My mother has placed flowers on tables that smell oddly of vodka. Everyone is laughing, for someone is telling jokes. Someone else is lifting my little sister up by her feet so that her nightgown falls backward over her head; another person is pulling at the braid that falls down my back while he or she says, "so shy, such blue eyes" and other comforting things.
In other dreams, my mother is refinishing an antique dresser. She is wearing faded blue jeans, a man's button-down shirt and gloves to her elbows. She rubs the surface of this dresser - round and round her arms move, making the grain of the wood first appear, then glitter, then gleam. My father is upstairs painting. The light from the enormous windows in his studio makes a line from the window to the easel. I feel that this light can, in the way of jumping ropes, encircle me with grace.
Or my mother is planting flowers and my father is singing. Or my father is fishing and my mother is rolling up her jeans at the edge of a river. In each dream about them, my parents are making the world beautiful for me. It is the reason, I am convinced, they were born.
In this precise way, the midwinter revelation I had been waiting for comes to me. I had been dragged down by the winter, not so much because my work at this time of the year is more demanding and must be done in cold rooms, but because I could see no beauty at all within it. I had been raised by people whose first priority when I was a child - and this has not changed about them - was the celebration of beauty as it existed in the natural world, in themselves, in others and in art. My father's paintings, no matter what else, are beautiful. My mother's house, right down to the little silver tray she puts cranberry relish in at Thanksgiving, is beautiful.
Until I recognized this essential aspect of my parents, the bare winter trees represented for me the terrible demise of better seasons in which things are born, rise, bloom and sing. The gray skies loomed down at me every morning, as if to call out a terrible threat against my safety and the safety of my children. The house was far too dark to be anything but hideous. The dog didn't so much bark as moan. The children cried; neighbors died; the mail didn't run.
Yet even against this background, lovers meet before fires. There, warmed and certain of their intention to be good to one another, they continue to learn who and why they are. And the moon still rises to remind us of the cycles of the seasons with which we should have, I now believe, an absolute alliance.
This winter I learned that I must be good enough to know the beauty of all seasons; I learned anew why I do applaud the scope and strength of the human spirit. It is this spirit - because it is able to look inside itself long enough to see from whence it comes, who it therefore is, and what, with luck, it will resolve to be next year - that I must celebrate, attend to and claim as my own.
Adrian Blevins-Church of Fincastle teaches writing at Hollins College.
by CNB