The night I met the moon

Winter, to me, isn’t about all those things you see on TV. Buying gifts for friends and family, hanging decorations and catching snowflakes.

Winter is a change in the world. Reds and golds of autumn turn to the whites and blues of winter.

Ah, l’hiver, but where most people’s fondest memories lie in warm fire pits and glossy tree ornaments, my fondest winter memory is this: Eight p.m., winter night, I’m just about eight or nine years old. My parents are bundling all three of us, my siblings and me, into heavy snow clothes. My jacket is so big and warm, it feels like being hugged all over.

Dad comes up from the basement carrying five sets of snowshoes. Two big, and three smaller pairs in descending size order. We all shuffle out into the porch light, flashlights in hand, and mount our snowshoes.

In a line, silently, we leave our driveway and walk through fresh-fallen snow, on a dirt-road dead end, in the middle of January. My siblings and I use our snowshoes to stand up way high on the tops of the snowbanks. I still manage to fall through the surface, leaving my little boots stuck in snow, heavier than sand. We have a grand old time, our only companion is the full moon.

Often, I still get nightmares about similar night time walks like these. They start simple and joyously. You ever notice that that’s how all the worst nightmares start? Happily? They start with me tromping along the top of the snowbanks. It feels like I’m on top of the world. My eyes are level with the heavy, tired canopy of pine trees, and the tops of my family’s winter caps are so close.

I stop to examine a branch, and my foot falls through a thin crust of ice on the top of the snowbank. I keep struggling to get my foot out of the snow, the cold slowly claiming my legs, but all I can do is cry with frustration, watching the turned backs of my family blur with tears.

Most nightmares would end here, but mine is worse. It doesn’t stop. I’m left alone, one leg held in an iron grip, the other uselessly half-buried. No lights come from my family. Not even a yell, asking where I am. It just goes on for an hour or so, no one around but the moon with her watchful craters and seely glow. No creature stirs the downy snow atop the pine boughs.

I get this nightmare so often it feels like a memory, a memory of that night when I met the moon. And I know it seems counterintuitive that my favorite memory of winter is one that I get nightmares about, but I think that the more powerful a memory, the more likely it is that you get nightmares or dreams about it.

Winter is somewhat melancholy for me. Since my siblings moved away to college, something changed about the way my family does winter. No longer do we have a hefty fall season of preserving berries and squash. And we don’t go on those winter night walks anymore. I do those alone. And it doesn’t feel the same either. It seems that I never have enough time to go out on nights with full moons and clear skies. Everything feels different when I do it now, and my jacket isn’t so small that it feels like a hug anymore.

Garrett Spelman

VT

16 years old

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