Life in the North can be wonderful if you can immerse yourself in the elements, and for me, that is a long winter’s writing. Enjoying the winter is the easy part, until the time of ice and leftover dirty snow piles begin the seemingly endless journey of melting. You can’t garden. You can’t really snowshoe anymore. Ice skating becomes difficult over cracks and crevices. The house, then, or studio, becomes the retreat of watching and waiting. Even the favorite path along the river is dangerous because of the icy slide into the racing melt-water. The writing season continues in earnest, for me, since I can place affect and thought into perspectives lost during a warm weather rant of biking, kayaking, and traveling. Three completed manuscripts chew at my synapses for improved phrasing and structure. The Penny has yet to finish another go-round of edit and polishing. And the kayak journals are at 90,000 words and only halfway complete. This sounds crazy, but in drafting this post, I think that maybe a slow spring would benefit my studio time. Already I can feel the push to get out and get moving no matter the ice and mud, so I slow myself with green tea and purposeful hours devoted to my writing life. I’ve already accepted an increase of magazine and paper assignments. Perhaps that will ensconce my fingers to keyboard and allow me to finish my writing goals before the first 80 degree day on the bay. However the time ebbs, I will continue the better life, I have now come to realize, that I discovered within myself during the 1,000 mile journey along Lake Superior. I’ve had fits and starts, but I now understand there was a time of individual recognizance necessary for the psyche to fully wrap itself around the danger and survival shaping my life’s symphonic movements into a 60th year. For this I am grateful.