I have been down this road better than 50 times that I can likely remember. It is the same and individually different. It always starts with the warmth of kitchens and a smell that brings me back to childhood days of crisp mornings, fresh paper, and the electromagnetic hum of fluorescent ballast.
The retreat happened over and over. We always knew it would be there. Days would become bright, but only because the dim light was unobstructed. Then in the four o'clock hour, the darkness came and there it stayed for three months.
Solace came across the nighttime stratosphere. A blowtorch that could be seen in the darkness across 400 miles of an infinitely dark sky. It reached across the Atlantic Ocean to the coast of Killadoon shining bright, clear through to the west coast of the African continent.
Radio waves, electric motors, and incandescent bulbs did their minimal damage to the great voice of friendship that reached across the darkness and kept me moving forward to the days in which I could climb the steps, swinging open the door of my personal bomb shelter, flooding everything with light again.
The day begins, the music is almost subliminal. But then with a great power, it happens. There is nothing that can stop it. The outside wakes up, and the land will grow with a vengeance that cannot be stopped now. The greens will share gentle and a variety of shades, that later, as protection will darken knowing that what is ahead, a few more days must be strived for.
The sun gets warmer and the stratosphere can no longer deliver the ally who comforts me in the darkness. That is okay. With each season comes its particular visitors.
The be here now mindset has always been a selective one for me. I might be called a fair-weather friend. All I know is that as the leaves break free from the buds on the branches to claim their natural rights, there is always something so familiar and yet something so new. The intensity of sensory appreciation is fully manifest. It is something that for some reason, is a struggle to maintain. As the weeks scroll by ever so quickly, desensitization lies in wait for a gray ambush. It is a battle that must be fought daily so that on the last day I do not look back thinking that it could have been different.
As I stood in that room in Corpus Christi in the Spring of 1996, everything was clarified for me. That of course is the extreme, but an ever-present reminder that it is important to appreciate a warm Summer day, to take in the scene, pause to look at the night sky, to be where I am, and not to worry about where I will be later.
So here today, I yield to the power of the season, promising this time it will be different.
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