The snow lays light on the ground, and I walk in the sunlight, feeling the prick of the cold on my ears: but I don’t care. It is the sun shining which keeps me hatless, regardless of the stripped trees, dying grass, the houses with their windows and doors wrapped up against the chill.
I am thinking of you, my friend: there is no one to replace you, no one who spoke into my life in quite the same way; and the sunlight on my light-starved skin reminds me of you in wordlessness. For what was I but a parka-encased soul, holding out against all the possible elements, when you softly and lovingly entered my life?
I look over the lake, subdued and white like a bride, and to the shores of the island, the tiny, far houses and trees bending towards each other in their winter dress. They seem like my memories of you, far and almost indiscernible. I cannot remember your smile, and I cannot remember even the exact color of your hair or your eyes: but I can remember the clothes we used to trade back and forth, and the flow of your handwriting, or your strong hug at the airport the last time I saw you. Strange, that what remains clear are those things which functioned as connections between you and me, like the causeway across the lake to the distant island. What remains living?
I feel my skin responding again to the precious, ephemeral wafts of light; and I feel like Iulus, with the divine fire crowning me: you convinced me to start un-wrapping my soul, and I remember being able to do so because you loved me. But yours was the kind of love, I remember, that showered itself freely wherever you went. Perhaps you never knew what you did for me, as you passed through my life, dancing through my winter landscape and scattering sunlight everywhere.
There is a kind of remembrance, like a footstep in snow, which gets encased in the ice: still living water, but frozen. Like ice on the surface of the water, these rememberings are lighter than seems possible, and they wait in one’s heart for those moments when they are needed. They are little pieces of you, which in the thaw, water my soul for the spring; they have become an integral part of the new growth there.
Also there is the remembrance of God: in His ever-spring, our philia – our friendship made pure by baptism in the fire of Him- lives on. So it is that you live on in my life, my friend, who loved me even when I was ugly, even when it seemed you were the only person to see some value in me, even as I was busily burying myself in snowdrifts. You are part of the green shoots in me, rising towards God. No matter what has happened to you- whether you are still on this earth or not- something of you lives on in me, and will, I pray, bend forward to meet you again in eternity.
