BY SYLVIA WORDEN
Copyright is held by the author.
OH DISCONTENT, how mild a word! Winter is darkness, depression as heavy as swimming in molasses, cold feet inside wet socks inside leaking boots.
The sun takes leave and the elderly slip away. Our souls ask us if we should follow, and we are tempted. My father fought death throughout a January night long ago, and he waits now — we all wait now — as my mother prepares to follow. We’ll have one more reason for our winter angst
This is not like the heat-induced madness of summer, with its violence born of too-close proximity to our fellow humans. The two seasons share nothing but whisky.
Our only weapon is light, here in this war that can’t be won. Light is an ancient comfort that must have begun with the glow of the campfires illuminating fresh paintings on cave walls, executed in coloured mud.
Bright memories of childhood winters tease us, or closer still, the memories of our children’s delight.
I fought my inchoate ennui last year by travelling to New York, surely a city of lights. I had persuaded my son to join me by offering him a ticket to King Lear on stage, with Kenneth Branagh in the lead role. We met at Penn Station after I had flown all night to Newark.
The play began in darkness. The drums spoke. The king appeared, dressed in rough animal hides that bristled with shaggy hair. Branagh portrayed Lear as a heathen caveman king, silently pointing out to us that this is a tale of the deep past — told before St. Augustine converted England to Christianity.
The king pounded his spear on the wooden stage in answer to the drums. He has summoned his army. Feet bound in leather, bodies in furs, they pounded their spears in rhythm as they circled their king.
I’m envious of these actors who have crossed a cold ocean to bring us a tale from the depths of their collective past. Some of this crew could walk through a forest — or even a city — in their own country and think, “Here is where my ancestors howled at the moon and painted with mud.”
My ancestors, they’re my ancestors!
No. I have thought of myself as a colonizer, a usurper, but now I understand that I am an orphan without a homeland. I am a citizen of a manmade country that has just turned 250 years old in the time it took England to blink. Another land owns my deep past, and I am a stranger here and there.
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Sylvia Worden is an emerging writer who previously worked in women’s healthcare and higher education. She lives in California, U. S., and is a member of the Davis Writers Salon.
