Pumpkin Beer

It is snowing again. The clouds passed over the flatirons rapidly and wrapped around the mountains before sitting atop the city. The wind picked up and the flakes started dumping all at once. It is my favorite kind of blizzard, the decisive kind which appears rapidly and decisively, no time to lose in putting the world on mute.

I played a game this evening, attempting to watch a solitary flake as it fell from the top of our tree and collected in a pile underneath. It moved so quickly that it was nearly impossible to track; on its own, it was imperceptible. And yet, the force of an entire storm has the capability of shutting down a city, of wreaking havoc on everyday life. One snowflake is novel but forgettable, a sea of them lends itself to blindness.

I thought of us today, in Kate's sister's apartment. I texted you to ask if that was the first time we got drunk, because some of the memories I thought would be impossible to forget are becoming hazy around the edges. And you, of course, remembered the six-pack of pumpkin beer. And then there was Kate rummaging through her sister's things because we needed more and the idea of using her sister's passport as a fake ID was not the kind of thing that would give her reason to pause. So she drove her sister's car--a stick shift she could operate only marginally--with us giggling alongside her to the liquor store and purchased us something ridiculous like wine coolers.

It's the kind of moment that I cannot fathom now, three children, a marriage, a career, and a mortgage later. But I think it is cruel to the people we were to look back and say those years were somehow less complex. I remember feeling things deeply, of looking at the world and puzzling at my place. I remember feeling as distinctly and viscerally lonely then as I do now. I think I have struggled at each stage, with different types of challenges, but I don't think I have ever felt things more or less intensely. It has all been raw and new and I have always been so very thirsty for just a crumb of understanding. But most of all, I have always walked with travelers as joyful and weary and anxious and drunk with pumpkin beer as I myself have been.

I know, with certainty, I will look back on this time of raising children and wish terribly for its return. But if you had asked me in those first middle-of-the-night-crying-filled months of Aria's life if I thought children were worth it, I likely would have wished to rewind. It seems the discomfort of a thing wears off and, through most experiences, we are more than capable of enduring, of adapting, of shedding an old skin and acquiring a new one that fits just a bit more appropriately. And more than simple endurance, we are capable of change and finding infinite reasons for gratitude and joy and connection. Each and every time I thought life was coming to an end, I was nearly always right. But the thing just beyond that ending was rich and beautiful and fruitful and catalyzed metamorphosis.

What I can remember about the pumpkin-beer night is the overly warm apartment and the novelty of being on our own in an adult's space. I remember thinking her sister was so old and yet as I consider it now, she had just graduated law school, so must herself only been a young person feigning adulthood. I remember the joy of learning who you and Kate were, of talking long into the evening, the freedom of occupying an actual real-person home and meandering through one another's hopes and dreams and past traumas as a means of digging tunnels closer and closer and closer to one another so that the distance of these physical bodies might become moot or--hopefully--wholly disappear. I remember the spark of potential for friendship and the infinite joy of recognizing and feeling recognized, of finding humans with whom I felt such a strong sense of belonging.

I think often what my life at school would have been like without both of you that first year. Of prank calls over land lines and condom balloons on door knobs. But mostly, I ruminate about what it would all be without you. And that is a dark space I dare not occupy for any period of time; because, if we are lucky, we make the acquaintance of a few humans who see so closely to the actual reality of our selves that the very prospect of life without them is a nightmare-scape, a place of inconceivable isolation (and, certainly, a distinct absence of pumpkin beer).

I watched the snow tonight fall in thick sheets from the sky, and was bowed over by the magnitude of a storm. And I looked at those flakes, falling by themselves, and I felt just a hint of loneliness because are we, as human beings, so different from those falling snowflakes? I am in this body and in this physical space and there is often so much distance, even between myself and the people I love most on the planet. But then I remember that none of us is actually enduring alone, are we? We are just one of a dizzying multitude; we bump and collide and fall, gracefully and randomly and magnificently as we descend toward the surface. 

There was a time when we fell together, so imperceptibly close that it was unclear if we were one or two or many. We were sent hurtling at magnificent speeds, carried by the wind toward new destinations and adventures and lives. For a time, we danced with intricate, graceful, and coordinated movement as we cascaded down, down, down. 

It struck me this evening that the beauty of the storm is never tied to the progression of any solitary snowflake, is it?  The beauty of a night like tonight is inextricably tied to the sum of the dizzying and intricate coordination of the entire mass as it descends gracefully and invariably toward the surface of the Earth, making contact, brushing, and spinning all together again and again and again over and over until it settles peacefully and irrevocably under the crooked branches of an old oak tree.