Places you will go

One of the notable changes about my 30th year of living is that I have come to terms with the fact that, barring some kind of electrical storm where my brain is re-wired, there is one time of year that to me personally might as well be a physical place on Earth.  "Winter" might as well have a real destination pin on a map, and cute candy cane font sign on the road when you enter it, because, for all intents and purposes, I travel there to visit smiles I've had and smiles I've saved up so much it built a town.  

Indulge me for a moment.  

"Winterville" always has the right amount of shimmery snow to walk in; it is vanilla, big blankets and wool sweaters, hugs, and every snowman I've ever built, every fort I ever dug out with a red runny nose.  There, there are toboggan runs any time, fresh trees in every house and so many Christmas lights you'd never wish it was daytime.  It has heart.  Though I do not stay very long at all; those Winters are gone of course and this one is happening now.  It's just so many first things started in Winter for me, best of all my boys birthdays.  Maybe it is the death of the seasons, death of the year, mixed all in with the exciting new.. it either feels some minutes as if I have lived the luckiest life I couldn't possibly ever live long enough to deserve it.  My heart is filled with gratitude instead of the grief that mostly everything pretty and warm in "Winter" town does not really exist, these small memories cannot leave this place.. and then other minutes feeling as if it's too much for me.  Like I am standing in a place equivalent to this commercial.

And that's when I leave.  By that time it is always dark, which make the lights all prettier, and I am always late.

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.” 
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night