It’s cooling off time in North Dakota. We are in the middle of an all day cold rain. They call these storms “Colorado Lows.” I’m not sure why, but I assume its some sort of low pressure system coming out of Colorado. If that’s not why it’s called that, then somebody really choose that name poorly, because I can’t be the only one who thinks the name has something to do with the thing itself.
Anyway, these Colorado Lows are the type that will bring blizzards in a couple months. A month? A couple weeks? I can’t be sure, but I know it’s close.
So, I’m taking the time to sit on a corner in downtown Bismarck, ND, looking out the windows of a place called Anima Cucina. This spot on a busy intersection with 8 foot windows is a great place to watch the world from a distance. The guy in a wheel chair crossing the street in the rain. The couple who seems not quite as close as they once were. The high school girls hoping to look better than they feel.
Sometimes the color of rain brings out sorrow. You know the way a certain sweater brings out your eyes, or the way a certain coat makes you feel good about yourself. Rain can bring to the surface a type of melancholy. Maybe that’s just me. A certain pair of pants might not make everybody look fat. But when these long cold rains settle in, I begin to notice the melancholy.
Winter will be here soon. Winter is amazing in Bismarck. Crisp, cold, nearly silent days where the sun shines so brilliantly she casts her reflection across the sky itself. A beautiful blanket of snow absorbs her heat and insulates the earth.
But that blanket isn’t here yet. I feel a longing for something that I know is coming soon, but I don’t know when. Perhaps that is the real source of the melancholy. An unmet longing, a growing expectation.
When I was a kid there was some song that my mom used to play on the cassette player in her Honda Civic. I just remember a few lines in the song to the effect that there is no light without darkness, no white without black, no happy without sad.
Maybe cold, fall rain melancholy is birthed out of hope for snow covered, sunny beauty. Maybe it arises from a certain knowledge that it will not always be like this. The sun splattered, snow covered days are coming.
And when they come, I know that I will ache for the tulips to burst through the frozen ground.
These cold rainy days we are living in will pass and give dawns to new days. Maybe this a part of what it means to be alive. To live with a sort of longing, an aching, for something else. Something beyond.