The Hardest Winter Of My Life

Writing from the messy middle

Another season is here that I was not sure I would live to see. The pink blossoms of the crabapple sprinkle the driveway, each petal a soft gasp of color. A single tulip has mysteriously appeared in our vegetable garden, a nomadic orange teacup brimming with sunlight. Two reunited mourning doves splash in the birdbath, grateful. The starlings have built their nest in my basketball hoop again. The only thing better than sinking a basket is giving up the game so something wild can be born.

I grass-stain my knees kneeling in a patch of dandelions. If there are weeds in my prayers, all the better. High above me, squirrels weave new nests from fresh-grown green leaves. In the background, the wind and the creek whisper the same secret language. Soon it will be early evening, and the yard will transform into a raucous symphony of bird songs.

This was the hardest winter of my life.

Never had I ever needed so many hugs. Never had I ever had such an impossible time returning phone calls, texts. Never had I ever struggled so hard to write a single poem. I imagine you know this, friends. I imagine I don’t need to say that you haven’t heard from me in a while because my symptoms have been difficult to manage. I couldn’t pick my pen up because I couldn’t pick my head up. All winter, each day was a fight just to breathe.

Because this newsletter is titled Things That Don’t Suck, my instinct was to stay in the realm of spring’s budding miracles. To keep praising fresh blooms and leave the pain out of it. But you know what doesn’t suck? The truth.

I made the choice to share my experience of the last months for this reason—

A few weeks ago, my parents visited. I wanted to hide my hurting from their hearts, tuck it away so they wouldn’t have to carry it, too. Pretend I was fine. But “We are always better with the truth,” my father had told me on the phone before the trip. So I fell into my mother’s arms, sobbing the way I did as a child when I fell off my bike. Do we ever stop wanting our mothers when we are sick?

Because I didn’t pretend to be okay—something new rooted between my parents and I. An even deeper tenderness. The kind of closeness that grows when no one is trying to spare anyone else from what’s hard to hear.

“People think the worst thing that can happen is the truth,” wrote Tony Hoagland. “The truth is not the worst thing that can happen.”

I am rarely inspired to write while hurting. I pick up my pen when I begin to pick up my head. I write from the soft (or not so soft) landing of the lesson learned. I write when I’ve had enough time and distance to say, “Thank goodness that happened.”

But today, so as never to clip the wingspan of truth, I am writing to you from the heart of the wound, from the bullseye of ache. I am writing in pain, friends, knowing many (if not most of you) are in some kind of pain as well.

Because I realized that if I only reach out to you from the healed place, from the lesson learned, then we don’t get to sit in vulnerability together. Neatly resolved stories signal that the exploration is over. Sometimes it’s not about knowing the answer, but being inside the question together. Being inside the hardest winter together. Being beside each other in the cold when, finally, the first brave sprout pushes through the hard earth, and a smile breaks the surface of our faces, and another season of our lives is upon us. And we gasp in color.

Love,
Andrea 🖤

p.s

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