Winter Requiem

I looked up “requiem” in Wikipedia,  making sure it meant what I thought it did.  

And found that yes….a requiem might work as a melancholy retrospective.  Still, I was also interested to learn that  “requiem” has a longer history as a Mass for the Dead, or better yet, a Mass OF the Dead (repose of souls, amen).

Actually, let’s go with that for a moment.  

Partially dead myself after a sleepless night with my  feverish  and vomiting 8 year old,

a smart 8 year old, I might add, who sweetly pointed out that a better term for puke is regurgitate, I’m indulging a twisted delight in morbidity (don’t look that up).

My tired brain evokes it’s own imagery for the”Mass of the Dead”:  

a whimsical, eerie Tim Burton panorama,  with elements of Tevye’s nightmare sequence  from “Fiddler on the Roof”,  and a skeletal bride I saw featured in a Day of the Dead painting in a San Antonio art gallery.  

Ok. Good.   I’ve malingered long enough (don’t look that one up either)..  

Let’s move on, as history did, to the musical requiem,  

melodic compositions that drifted from liturgical regions and swept moodily through oceans of retrospection.   Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin. 

And here I attempt a written composition… my Winter Requiem, on Nora’s sick day.

As impossible as it is, I simply cannot let it go.   I’m a word nerd; I get attached .  I’ve mused all day as I’ve tucked and caressed Nora, wiping up  her  apple cider and herbal tea spills.  I’ve mentally wrestled with hoar frost and music noire through episode after episode of Phineas and Ferb (“You broke the arms off my Armoire!  Now it’s just a Oire!”).  I paused to reassure Nora about the common nature and course of fevers (I unwittingly alarmed her when I mentioned that fever is our body’s way of burning out infection)…and at last, after actually listening to some Nocturnes and wistful waltzes, and tinkering with winter scenes I caught on my i-phone, I think I have it. 

My Winter Requiem is about accepting and honoring the current moment, and transcending it.

Alice Sara Ott says that Chopin taught his students that to really know their music, they had to close their eyes, and be in it without seeing.  Hear and feel it in the dark.   She talks about how she finds peace in the stillness of his music.  I do too… Chopin’s music has  a pure,  crystalline-without-being-fragile, everything-else-in-the-universe-is-holding-its-breath quality.   And it moves deftly through a wide spectrum of the sublime,  from deep sadness to sparkling joy.

Winter does that for me too.

It is my least favorite season, the season of cold, dark, and death.  And puking (or as Nora puts it, regurgitating).  And yet, despite the biting temps and loss of summer abundance,  winter can offer an almost celestial beauty.  Lately, that beauty is manifest in a merciful shroud:  blankets of frost and snow covering the earth’s stark, gloomy decay. Serene, like Chopin’s spun-glass notes, and when I’m alone in frosty fields and trees, I am transported.

Also.  In the silence of winter, I can regroup, collect my creative thoughts, and muster….well, muster whatever needs mustering (Phineas and Ferb are still reverberating between my ears).  Winter gives me the space I need to be still for a season and then  start afresh, transcending decay and reaching for the eternal.