Vitamin Adjust

It's winter weather, I remember as I start down Kendall Road with my dog. Layering weather. The brush of my bare arms against my new winter jacket reminds me that I left my fluorescent orange running shirt, the shirt sure to keep me warm on my pre-dawn jog, back at home. 

Ah, well. I won't turn back now. I swing my arms with more vigor and anticipate the one-mile flush of warmth that will invariably overtake my chilled body. 

Sure enough, like clockwork, it comes. Sometime after a high, hunting eagle screams into the dark and sometime before Minty and I start our slow lope up Cottonwood Road, I feel it. The tingle of life returns to my fingers. My core temperature begins to rise. Soon I am stripping off my hat and my gloves and unzipping the front of my jacket. Whoever dreamed a mile could make such a difference?

I consider this phenomenon later. My system's ability to adjust to nearly any situation, given enough time. I'm moving again, back on Cottonwood Road and walking toward the mountains in the dusky space between sunrise and full day. To my left, a field sits still and dark, bordered by golden grasses that have held the night's precipitation and spun it into the most delicate of frosty-white lace. Compelled, I stop and raise my phone for a photo, and a surprising sense overtakes me. 

I'm going to miss the winter. 

The thought arises unbidden, fueled by a sudden awareness that only during winter do these visual offerings occur. I continue my walk with my dog, but my mind turns this idea over and over, worrying it like a stone in the pocket of a child. I've not felt so fondly toward winter for years. Could it be that, after enough seasons spent in the northlands following our move from New Mexico, I've adjusted to the cold, the gray, the never knowing if my front deck will be coated in a deadly-thin layer of ice? Could it be that I've found found blessing in a season that, for so long, represented only restriction, darkness, and cold? 

I believe that it could. My phone timer chimes and I should turn around, but I'm not quite finished with this little journey. Minty and I press on a little while longer and as we go, I savor the sting of cold on my cheeks, the patter of last night's ice crystals as they fall softly from a small stand of trees, and the way the fog uncurls, and rises from its low mountain bed like a silent cat stretching and starting its day. 

I like winter, I realize. I've adjusted to one more thing. 

My steps lighten as I head home. I wonder what gifts I might uncover as I adjust to other situations, other types of dark and cold. I'm not going to speculate too long, but I trust that, like today's surprise understanding, these gifts will arrive in their time. All I have to do is keep walking.