Nancy Simard

“There is an articulation of life one hears again and again. People will say, 'oh, this is only a season'. You know what I am referring to, don't you? I mean how if someone is in difficulty they'll say 'it's only a season'. Or if someone is having a new baby and in the sleepless nights, an older woman will comfort with this idea that the expanse of time is a season - a winter, I suppose? (rather, a hurricane season!) - and the season will change eventually to something sunnier. I take issue with this. There are, by definition, four seasons that repeat in human life, I have to think that when it comes to seasons we all get one round. We are born and grow through childhood in spring. We live those glorious, lively years of our twenties, thirties, forties in summer. We settle ourselves in autumn, that cool but not yet cold time, rich and aromatic. And in winter we age (brutally) and die. One turn of the seasons per person, unless it's cut short (...). But I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction. By and large a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what i'm getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside. Maybe you have a warm supper and stay a night or maybe you stay there a few years. I had one of those stopovers when the children were young, just before Gilbert died, and Daan and I were happy, even though I didn't know it was happiness at the time because it felt like busyness and exhaustion and financial stress and self-doubt. But Gilbert's death was a swift ejection back out to the loneliest bitter stretch of road, and that is the bone crunching grief. I'm not saying I did not come in from the wind a few more times in my life; I have. (...) The stretches on the high, windblown road are far commoner than the stopovers in comfort, and aren't we always trying to get back to the happier times?”
― Virginia Evans, The Correspondent