The Farm In The Winter

This past weekend I took up to my old family farm where my brother and his family now live, to spend some time with my niece and nephew. The one thing about “the farm” is that it’s always the same. It’s consistent, dependable, and stable. It’s grounding, gorgeous, and connects my present to my past. It’s a blessing that I have - to be able to go back and literally recreate my memories. Every time I go, it’s a tumultuous experience because my brother and I couldn’t be more different and it can cause a lot of anxiety for the both of us - we love each other, but we fight as much as we love. It can be hard, but I go because my niece and nephew mean the world to me. The cold snapped me back to the reality and harshness that exists when surviving in a northern Canadian town - I would spend hours of my childhood, red cheeked with frozen eyelashes, building snow forts and making adventures on the frozen river. How I spent so many hours outside as a child I will never know - because this weekend I could barely spend 20 minutes without running inside to thaw my fingertips (despite wearing gloves.) But there’s something about the roughness of farm living in the middle of winter that reminds me just how resilient I am. As my niece and nephew painted ceramics and did crafts and played games I was reminded of my own childhood spent around the table painting handmade ceramic ornaments and building gifts out of nature’s treasures - money might have been tight, but creativity certainly wasn’t. As we built forts and watched Christmas movies, snuggled in warm with each other I was taken back to my childhood where 7pm on Sunday was the only time in the week that I would be quiet so I could watch whatever Disney movie played for the next 2 hours before I would have to wake up for school and the taunts of my bullies the following week.

The farm in the winter is the perfect teacher for duality: hard but soft. Like my brother’s relationship and mine - it’s motivated by softness but has really hard edges in both directions. The farm in the winter is both beautiful and painful at the same time - like the memories I carry from my childhood, remembering the joy, the love, the warmth as it fades from my mind to be replaced with have tos, should haves, and need tos that come with adulthood. The farm in the winter is a blessing that I am thankful that I not only got to experience, but that I continue to - despite the frosty eyelids, frozen fingertips, and dry cracked skin. Those are temporary, but the memories forever.