Premonition of Snow

Being a psychic's daughter means I have to contend with my own abilities, too. It's like hanging out with an artist or someone who knits. You explore your own talent for the activity because it's in your environment, your relationship. Mother always said everyone is psychic, just like everyone can play something on a piano. But not everyone is Mozart. Certainly not me.

I wrote this a couple years before I moved to North Carolina (for 18 months) and then Wisconsin (for many years). In both places, I had a full change of seasons and cold winters with snow (because I drove up to friends in the Blue Ridge many times while in NC). I knew this change was coming, I saw and felt it before it happened.

Changes are coming, in more ways than one. Moving is in the air—this time alone—as I feel a drive for new beginnings, on my own.

I have long given up on thinking there is someone for me; but I know if I stay here with Mom, there never will be. There is no energy left for anything besides my work and her. I am frightened of where I will land. I need my pets around me, an understanding place that will let me have them all. I need some room, a little garden, some greenery, close to work, with safety and peace. I need light and harmony.

Give it to me! I so richly deserve it.

But beyond this need...I feel a hint of snow in the air, that cold smell beneath grey skies. There are bare trees and snowflakes. Most of all, there are achingly beautiful Falls, with crispness in the air, and the vivid colors; the sharp pain of change, death in its cycle, the stirrings of flight and migration.  Although the year is dying then, I always feel myself reborn. It is my birth time, and my time of poetry and song. It is the time of contrasting cold outside with snug warm houses and yellow lights. Halloween. Thanksgiving. Football. The joy of wine-rich air in your lungs.

This is not California, no no....this feeling has followed me for years now, urging me to go to Boston, to Vermont, to New Hampshire, to insane places where I would surely tire of the cold and slush and grey. But where and how and when?

Mother talks about moving to the mountains of Virginia. (Note: She never did.) But I will not move with her. I need distance, the more the better. I need my life back. She is careless, playing with and breaking us like toys in the hands of a willful child. I want my Christmas to be what it should me. I want to hear my own carols in my own heart, and feel the peace and beauty of that moment on my own, in my own way. My Tarot cards leave me trailing in a wilderness of mystery: currents and eddies, false breezes, uneasy dreams. I try to see but I cannot always see clearly. My scale is off; what I perceive as big changes are small ones, seen through a veil of intuition. There are shapes and skylines, money and men and friends...but I cannot gauge the horizon, guess their size. Is it a city in miniature, a small pile of dollars, a few good friends? Or is it wealth enough to make choices, the love of my heart, a tidal wave of major change? Where does the crisp golden sap of Autumn and the cold smell of snow come into my life? Where are the wool-coated arms with the outdoors and cologne and man smell on them, crushing me to his chest in playful passion?

Do we always realize our dreams or can we be snuffed out in the midst of them? Do those who stand on the brink of death still dream their dreams and have their hopes? Or do they waver, sensing some severance from their linear lives? I try to believe it all has pattern and purpose, but I do not know if that is simply the comfort one gives oneself or a universal truth.