Winter on the 53rd Parallel

Edmonton, Alberta

My first post. Hello!

I’m Dallas Curow and I’m a photographer at creative director at Luminarie Creative, a studio based in Edmonton, Canada. I’m a former writing and marketing professional, and occasional freelance writer, too. I’ve kept a regular journal since I was a ‘tween. Now I write every day before my small children awake in the mornings or after their bedtime.

I signed up for @Beth Kempton’s lovely Winter Writing Sanctuary as a Christmas gift to myself. I thought it would be a wonderful way to find solitude during the holidays. I’ve decided to share some of my work here. The following was from my warmup.

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DAY ONE

I certainly wasn’t dreaming of a green Christmas.

Half the time we abhor the unseasonable, call it unreasonable when its winds don’t billow in our favour. We call it foreboding or even catastrophic when it disrupts our lives, wringing our hands about what’s to be done.

When a vein of warmth is mined from a usually frozen solid season, however, I watch people simply shrug and call it a natural phenomenon, or call it a day and just tuck ourselves away from the growing unease.

Outside my three windowpanes, upon which paper stars reflect their amber glow, I see only the blackest emerald velvet lawn instead of the familiar sparkle of silver in December.

I curl up in our new home with its old bones and revel in its transformed state. I wonder idly if I might peel myself away from these coziest of confines to greet the eerily mild daybreak and take a walk. But I’ve got hours to decide.

Here, winter solstice blankets us in nearly 18 hours of night.

When we arrived eight years ago, the dark mornings were an inkwell into which I’d unwittingly tumbled. Seasonally affected, I’d drown in the navy depths.

Since then I’ve come to know and love the 53rd parallel and even its endless winters, so much so that the (often spectacularly beautiful) late sunrises feel like an afterthought. A tentative hello from the daytime after the blissful sanctuary of shadows reluctantly recedes.

I wish everyone I love could be here, carelessly unfocusing their gazes alongside me, staring into the indigo abyss outside.

Together we could sit beside the dancing fireplace, steam unfurling from our mugs, watching as the outlines of evergreens slowly reveal themselves as the morning skies illuminate and become cerulean.

But I am alone, cradled by the soothing pre-dawn silence, and it is now that I feel closest to the ones of you who are farther away, both in this world and the mysterious one beyond. I think of you so often in these moments.

Then, almost imperceptible: the squeak of duetting door hinges and the padding of four tiny feet approaching. I am nudged back into consciousness and the daylight hours begin.