#mesembria

It is going to be over. Soon your little family will drift their separate ways.

Knowing this, the moment stretches, it shimmers, it squeezes in your chest, but it does not stay nearly long enough. Before you can get your last look, it’s vanished into the air, and there are tears streaming down your face. A sea of shapes beyond the brilliance surges up, roaring back at you.

You turn from the lights, and your friends are crying too. And holding each other. And laughing, beautifully, brightly. The sound is not over yet.

You’re not lying on a couch but floating on a calm sea. Drifting peacefully.

You smiled and stared at the cracked ceiling. You felt so good. Tired, warm, empty, safe. In the best of ways.

It is cold outside, a grey overcast sky and two feet of snow.  It is a deep winter day.  There are some critter tracks in the snow, but most are moving silently or not at all.  Today is not a school day; you are going to go play in the snow. You are bundled in thick rubber boots, deep blue snow pants, bright pink snow coat, a red beanie, red earmuffs, and black snow gloves.  Your scarf is red checked, and underneath all this you’re wearing black sweatpants and a teal sweatshirt with a puff-paint image of a fluffy white cat on it.  

You tromp through the snow, the perfect thick snow for making a snowman, and decide that is what you are going to do.  You go to the neighbor property, between where you live and where your grandparents live, because no one will interrupt you with snowballs. 

You begin rolling the base.  Around and around and around the yard you push it, your small muscles feeling the joy of motion.  You are clever, dodging mud and too thick spots until you finish the first ball.  It is almost as tall as you.

You roll the second and third balls in the same way, and line them up near the first.  You are sweating and your face is red, but you are delighted at how perfect they look!  Only a few pine needles, only a small amount of dirt.  Behind this old house there are some plastic egg crates used for transporting gear.  You run behind the house and grab one, wedge it into the snow and dirt so it will be steady.  You muster all of your energy and pick up the second snowman ball, climb up the crate, and place it firmly on the first snowman ball. 

You take a breather and think about how you’re going to get the third ball on.  You don’t want to ask for help because this is yours, proof that you can do this by yourself.  There are tires in the shed from old rigs.  You roll one of the tires near the snowman… almost lost control there!  Roll slowly!

Your snow pants are keeping out the snow, but you are beginning to feel them get damp.  You find an old board and put that upon the tire, then the crate back on top of the board.  Very carefully, slowly and with calculated movements, you are able to roll the head snowball up the board, and then lift it to the top of the snowman.  You almost lose it but you are successful!

In the yard, you find two good arm branches, and you place your own red check scarf about the snowman’s neck.  You find rocks for eyes and buttons by digging down in the snow, but there is nothing out here that looks like a carrot.  

You have to ask a parent for the carrot, and you do, trudging back to the house.  Your mother comes out with you to the snowman, not believing you’ve made it yourself.  She puts on the carrot and is so impressed she has to take a picture. 

You are seven.  You are small, and you’ve made a snowman, by yourself, which is nearly six feet tall.  You breath in the pride of the adults, and feel like you can accomplish anything you decide to.  You cross your arms and grin with pride for the photo. 

This memory is short. You are walking, some rural trail, or on the edge of a forest - it doesn’t matter. You are young. You are with your family. It’s not important, not compared to the taste.

Wild fruits have a strict order here. No strawberries or peaches or plums this far north; raspberries and blaeberries for a brief fortnight, sour rhubarb and small apples, then brambles for a month, and then winter.

There is a corridor of tangled bushes along a path, and one of them is in fruit. The raspberries are tiny, the size of the tip of your thumb, and you are a child in between growth spurts at this time; they are a few clustered ruby globes huddled together, nothing more.

(Later, you learn what rubies really look like, and you realise how apt the description is.)

You eat them. (Of course you do.) And they taste like perfection. No raspberries, before or since, have ever tasted as good as these ones. They will never be as tart, as sweet, as refreshing; no raspberry will every taste as much of raspberry, as much of sweet summer sin, as much of the wild and the sky and the buzzing flies; no raspberry will ever taste of freedom like these do.

Take the raspberries. Take their promise and their wildness and the terrible joy of summer fruit. Create whatever story you want to go around them; the taste is the important thing here.

Take the eternal thirst for more that they inspire. They will never be enough, but they will always call you on to more.

Eos is East, it is the dawn of things, the unformed potential of a day only just begun.  It is beginnings and togetherness and wholeness.  It is friendship, the shared cup, the in-joke.  It is companionship, the warm press of fur, the cold nose, the brush of feathers or scales.  It is family by choice or by birth, protective and true.  What nurtured and protected us in our helplessness and rejoiced with us in our joy.  Eos is in the earliest lovely thing we can remember, and in every moment where something new grows and blooms.

Mesembria is South, the high noon of adventure, of the unlikely and delightful.  It is there in the moments of raucous laughter but also in the grandeur of the view from the mountaintop. It is the living forest, but also the liminal shore. It is often summer, toes in lakes, and the blinding flash of light on the water, but there is room for winter here as well in the pelting of snowballs and adventure on the ice. Mesembria is life, pure and unbridled, reckless, irrepressible, in all its beauty and danger and delight.

Hesperus is West, the direction of sunset and peaceful memories, thoughtful silences, the still moments gently suspended between the treeline and the evening star.  It is autumn smoke and the shadows of family, it is time passing in beautiful golden glory. It is wind, heavy with portent, brushing past us as we thumb through memories with one hand and clasp the fingers of an old friend with the other.  It is the past, but it is also, in some ways, the future, as the horizon may recede or approach depending on where we stand, and where we move.  Hesperus is the ending of things that never end.