As the days shorten and the nights grow colder, sometime around the middle of October, I begin to anticipate.  My aspirations and my feelings bloom in the winter's gloom; they burst forth like arctic flowers under the thin steely light.  Sunsets take on extra beauty as the rosy, golden end of day reflects back from the playa lakes and refracts in the deep haze above.  

As the summer dies a final, thrashing Indian summer death, the world seems to open up, the cerulean skies begin to glow. Cerulean - that particular shade of blue, tinged with turquoise, light and oddly metallic, underlies the steelier aspects of winter like a jewel in a silver setting.  

 My favorite paintings are winter scenes; my husband, an artist, has painted for me winter wonderlands to gaze at here in our plains home, bereft of snow.  The snows in my paintings, the skies outside my windows - cerulean dreams inside and out.  Through my clerestory windows, as I sit and type, I can see a slice of sky; the light is hard and clear and cold, just the way I like it.

I am child of winter, born on the winter Solstice under cerulean skies.   Some of my most meaningful memories were formed under the lowering embrace of that heavenly shade somewhere between blue and grey.  

My first love, a Native American  quarter-horse-racing computer nerd bestowed my fist kiss upon me in November, as Canada geese alighted on a slate pond.  At college, I declared my independence from my parents and then dined, al fresco, Christmas lights twinkling, homeward-bound students scurrying, puffy, steel-grey clouds redolent of snow yet to come floating overhead.  

Years later, a failed marriage and a parental reconciliation smarter, I cried tears of joy on the front porch of my tiny Dallas home as my forever love decorated our tree with his pledge - a diamond engagement ring.  Our beloved son was born of winter - a spring child who could not, would not, did not wait for the bluer skies of late March.  

The skies of my heart are cerulean blue, grey-green, wrapped in the cotton wool of winter.