Vitamin Love

Snow drifts down this evening. The sun, having long ago made its exit to warm others’ domains, has made space for the on-creeping dusk. Night hangs heavy over this silent world. Pools of light from low-crouching homes punctuate the darkness. The calls of two owls break the calm.

I wonder what they might discuss. Their hooting surely warns off their tiny, warm prey, but perhaps they’ve already hunted their fill. Scuttling bodies lack camouflage when it snows, after all. Maybe they’re just conversing for the love of it.

Perhaps that’s why I converse, too. On an evening like this, scarved in silence and shrouded in shadows, exchanging a few words feels like firelight, like blankets, like food. Solitude may satisfy me in the daytime, but when night falls and the light from my deck illuminates each tiny snowflake’s descent, I long for connection, for friends. Amid the thousands of unmarked arrivals that a snowstorm represents, I crave an arrival of my own, welcomed and recognized in a loved-one’s eyes.

And so, like these owls, I reach out. I text. I telephone. I bump shoulders with my teenage boys who, surprisingly, bump back. When I subside into silence, the owls’ discussion remains. I listen in, and their conversation lulls me to sleep. It is the sound of friendship, of shared life, of love.