First it’s winter and dark and cold and snow and waiting, always the waiting.
Then the wind shifts and comes from the south and brings fresh scents of promise and sometimes more cold, but not the same cold. A warmer cold, a wetter cold, a cold that is just stopping by to say hi.
But the sun wakes up and lifts it’s head after a lazy winter and climbs higher in the sky and slowly slowly makes the earth start to vibrate heat warm.
Warmth means melt means water means mud, at least it should, if you’re living right, if you ever step off the sidewalk.
Sidewalk mud isn’t real mud, sidewalk mud is just dirty water salt sand leaves dog poop.
Real mud is field forest yard playground honest to goodness dirt plus water plus feet and trodding and stomping and joy and laughing and forgetting that someone is gonna have to do this laundry.
Real mud gets on your boots and on your pants and on your socks and oh my god how did mud even GET there. You didn’t even think that was a place you could get mud.
And you love the mud but you hate the mud and sometimes you forget that you ever loved the mud, in those moments when you realize that YOU are the one that has to do that laundry, and clean those floors, and wash those kids, and hey, that was my flower garden.
And then you get stuck in the mud, but not even the real mud, just the mud that’s always there, the mud that brings you down a little by little and gets in your head and gets in your brain and oh my god how did mud even GET there.
It’s the mud that comes with being the adult in the room, the mud of practicality, of “it’s a weeknight”, of “I can’t play, I’m too busy”. It’s the mud of having to grow up, of hats-not-elephants-in-snakes, the mud of the Swamp of Sadness that swallows your pony.
And then you forget that there was ever anything BUT mud, and getting stuck, and falling down, and losing your boots, and almost following poor, sad Artax.
But then you remember that with the mud comes the buzz of life-in-process, the sticky wet stains on the sides of maples and squirrels licking at broken branches and those oh so wonderful freeze distilled icicles as sweet as popsicles.
And then you remember that what’s the point of doing the laundry and cleaning the floors and washing those kids if they don’t get muddy in the first place, that mud BELONGS in those places you didn’t think you could get mud.
And then you remember that you DO love the mud, the real mud, the mud that is day-to-day in-the-moment honest to goodness joy plus tears plus hands plus home and hard work and failures and successes, the mud that is life-worth-living.
The kind of mud you only find when you step off the sidewalk and let yourself find it.
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