The falls was never a winter place for me; it has always been overlaid with boyhood summer adventures; playing pirate or cowboy along the creek through a forest park that seemed unexplored and vast. Last year I decided to see it in winter.
At the falls, ice limned the shapes of rushing water like a memory. There was no sparkle; the forms were unchanged, but life had gone away.
The place was private now, waiting, turned inward. Perhaps it was like married love, where aging together strips away everything that does not matter. You become aware of the wintering of flesh, hers, yours, and of her particularity. You discover how the body becomes a carnival mask, which tells you little about the person who now wears it. The girl of summer is still there, but there is winter too.
I now wear the mask of an old man, she of an old woman. Yet somehow little has changed, though nothing is the same. We can still see through the carnival disguise, and find the lover who began it all. A good dinner, talk and some wine helps
You would think an old man should be wiser. But at times I still pause when the chime strikes midnight and my mind has the thought: “How does this keep going on?”
But my heart says: “She wore a different mask years ago, and you believed it was her. Who was the fool?”
So, I have learned that once you accept that you are a fool and there is no hope for it, life opens up again. When you give up knowing things and float on the ocean of God’s foolishness you begin to trust your heart.
So that day at the falls I stood by the parapet on the overlook and suddenly, in memory, I had my cap gun holstered on my hip, ready to charge up the path on an adventure. -I felt love for that boy, his imagination, his good heart, and his delight in everything that sparkles. – Neither he nor I were going to be fooled by frozen water. The falls had on a winter mask; but lovers and the boys of summer do not believe in winter. It is a snapshot in time, no more.
What I call myself seems to have become a crowd of places and moments. The boy of summer, the young lover, the husband, the father are not gone. What has changed is that there is now a watcher behind a mask, beguiled, but not taken in. The watcher lives in every season, and no season, traveling back and forth in dream and reverie. -And grateful to have a lover for companion on this strange journey.
The waitress who serves our slice of pie when we go out for a dessert thinks we are a “cute old couple” (I overheard her saying this). -She won’t know until winter comes to her what things are possible in the winter season.