january stories

I am amazed by the way my memories are tied to the seasons.  Wading into the middle of January brings up so many things I hadn’t thought of for a long time. The view out my window is of bare branches and light sky, just like every January I can remember.  It feels the same, and different...every year.

The other day I heard a Pearl Jam song, and thought about the boy I knew who died fourteen years ago this January.  I had met him that night.  We talked and laughed with Eddie Vedder's voice in the background:  I wish I was the full moon shining off a Camero's hood...We’d been partners playing the board game, ‘Risk’ at a friend’s house; all of us back in Bozeman for our first long holiday as college students.  I shared a beer with him, both of us sipping from the same bottle.  A friend stood up and told a story of chance; how he'd made a deal with a professor, bet his final grade on the flip of a coin.  We cheered when he told us it landed on heads, an 'A'.  We cheered because we had always been young and lucky.  My new friend left before I did, driving out onto the icy highway, the heavy snow.  I passed the accident on my way home but didn’t realize.  Not until the next morning when the phone rang.

Or I think of the January I was twenty-three, fresh out of graduate school and preparing to abandon my life for a few months to live in a VW van, touring the Southwest.  I think of how simple it was to just set my life down for a season, then pick it up again, as I coasted back into Missoula that spring.

Drying Aven off after a bath the other night, I thought about my life two years ago, when I made the decision to stop nursing her, to finally separate our bodies.   For good.  And I wrote about this part of parenting, the deliberate letting-go that we do.  And that piece of writing sat buried in my computer for two years, until today.  Today, that piece was published by Mamalode.

You can read what I wrote
two years ago here.