I cried during the closing ceremonies, and not because the USA Hockey Team lost to Canada in overtime.
I cried during Neil Young’s performance of “Long May You Run.” It’s not the first time I’ve cried during a song.
It was a combination of emotions. The way the Olympic games make me feel, the power of the athlete’s stories and performances, a year’s worth of sleep deprivation, and the end of February.
This time last year I was a couple weeks into recovering from childbirth, which for me was an unexpected emergency c-section. I was sore, exhausted, hormonal, depressed, and my boobs hurt from breastfeeding. My body felt completely foreign to me.
After a year, I am finally beginning to feel normal. Over the weekend, I put Oscar into his Ergo and took a walk around the block. I couldn’t get over how tired and out-of-shape a simple walk made me feel. But for the first time in years, I felt like doing something about it.
This morning I stepped outside on my way to work and there was something in the air. Maybe it was my revelation over the weekend, maybe it was the Neil Young song, maybe it was the fact that it’s March 1st. It was cold, the thermometer stood at 31 degrees, but the air had a strange liquid quality to it. There was dew on the windshield instead of ice. The air had a different smell to it. I thought of the end of the Sylvia Plath poem, “Wintering,” where she writes about bees waking up from their winter hibernation:
Winter is for women —-
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanis walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold
and too dumb to think.
Will the hive survive,
will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of,
the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying.
They taste the spring.
My perfect moment is that this morning, I could taste the spring. I could feel a lengthening and stretching in my body, a reaching toward the spring, toward the summer, toward the sun. There is still snow on the ground, still three more weeks of winter, and there will still be more snow and more frigid nights and mornings. But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I’ve decided to commit myself to running a 10k race this summer. There is one on Saturday, June 26, which is roughly sixteen weeks away. I can’t wait to run again.
We’ve been through
Some things together
With trunks of memories still to come
We found things to do
In stormy weather
Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Although these changes
Have come
With your chrome heart shining
In the sun
Long may you run.
For more perfect moments, visit Lori
Between Lightning 