A Certain Kind of Crazy

A certain kind of crazy

It’s mid-May now and West-Central Wisconsin at the 45^th Parallel has greened up nicely. I’m rambling with my dog along the St. Croix River walking path. She is overloading her senses with the smells of every blade of grass, every dandelion, every dead fish washed up from the spring flooding (Ya, I know… but she loves it). I, in the meantime, am soaking up the light that filters down through the branches of the 100 year-old cottonwoods. The air is thick with chlorophyll to the point that I may just walk out of here with my skin as green as the leaves on these ancient trees that mark my route.  It feels that tangible.

I can’t even remember winter. I’m trying to picture myself just a month ago on this same walk. But the world was contrarily white then, unrecognizable to today.  And that is the nature of where I live. Like Prince Rilian in The Silver Chair, who was bewitched so that he became two different people at two different times of day, I experience the same sort of enchantment here at the 45th. We have white. Then we have green.  And it produces in us, the Northerners, a certain kind of crazy.

When it’s winter, our world, our land, ourselves, are painted a monochrome of white-gray.  A stray cardinal at the bird feeder is all that brings a twinge of my other life to me, like a dementia where I can almost but not quite remember what it was like to be warm and go barefooted. I cannot for the life of me visualize the humid days of velvet moss, tornado warnings and thunderstorms, potted petunias in red-white-and-blue, or knee high corn, or cherry trees.  Even when I look back at photos to try and get a feeling for the summers past, it is completely alien—somebody else’s world. Come on, my friends at the 45^th, you know what I’m talking about here.

One day, it feels as if the colorless, temperature-less eternity will surely be permanent and that even the word “summer” is a made-up word from made-up lands like Narnia or the Shire.  Then, the next day, little rivers of melting snow begin traversing the downhills of our streets.  And the day after that the air feels less dry, less bitter, less harsh. Then, BAM, everything, everything is full of color once again. And BAM, I can’t remember winter anymore. It was only four weeks prior but I can’t feel it. Can’t conjure it.

I was thinking on my trek with my pup this morning about the craziness of living year-in and year-out halfway between the Equator and North Pole-- the insane mental enchantment that comes over me where I don't recognize my past life from the "other world" I lived in for the last 6 months.  I'm  Jekyll & Hyde, Prince Rilian & The Knight. 

A peek into my brain and you'll find that I've made the leap from the above thought to wondering if our counterparts in Chile experience the same insanity of mind. I say a prayer for Chile as we trade places with them this time of year.  We get to lean in toward the sun. They have to lean away. I wish them well. I pray that their winter as they enter it may not be too harsh, or too dark for too long.  And when winter returns up here, (and I don’t intend to dwell on THAT thought any longer than this blog post!), perhaps my one lifeline to feeling the summer will be imagining all those Chileans basking in warmth and color. It still won’t seem real, though. Crazy that way.