A few weeks ago I went down to visit my mother in Salina. It’s about a 45-minute drive from my school now. You go through a few towns and, I have been making the drive since I was ten years old because of divorced parents. It has become quite boring. Thankfully, there is a way that makes it 35 minutes instead of the 45, and it’s not speeding, just a back way that skips over a town.
The holiday season is coming up. As I write this it’s basically here. The American holiday Thanksgiving is over so it is time for a Christmas overload. Christmas is my favorite holiday, even with the heartbreak in my life it still brings me joy. A lot of kids from broken families do not like Christmas, from my observations, but I do. One of my favorite things about the season is the music. Anytime I can listen to Christmas music I do. I love it. So does my mom. Around this time anytime we clean we have Holiday music on.
Before I started my trek back to college my mom was cleaning and, in true Amy fashion, Christmas music was on. Before leaving, a song came on by a Mannheim Steamroller named Veni Veni. It was a Latin version of Oh Come o Come, Emmanuel. Or it at least had the same notes the words were just sung in Latin. It is slowly becoming one of my new favorite songs this season. My choice of Christmas tunes are ones that make me feel like I am running through a winter scene in medieval times even though in medieval times they celebrated Christmas a lot differently.
One of the ways I make the 45 to 35-minute drive more manageable is listening to music. So I put on Veni Veni. Most of the time my brain goes on autopilot and I just focus on the road to make sure I avoid getting hit or hitting something else. This time, I looked out. Out of the windshield and the protection of a car. I saw something dreadful. I saw the world. The warming battered world. The fields of rural Utah looked dead. Brown, Yellow, Orange. Somehow the song capture my hopelessness as I looked.
As I said, I have been driving down this road since I was ten. Even just last year there was something alive. In reality, it was lifeless it was just snowing. Winter is when things die but the earth is kind and puts a blanket on the dead so we have something beautiful to look at. But then and there, it was nothing. Not even the ghost of what was, just brown and hot.
The first time I sat down to write this story a weather notification came up on my phone saying that warmer weather would create the worst hurricane. This morning I asked myself “I wonder when it will snow” and was disappointed when my phone showed that it would be in the ’50s during the first week of my beloved December.
Maybe the people who I argue with are right, maybe it is natural. While I lose these arguments because I can’t articulate the research I’ve done in the right way, research has been done. The world is dying, and it is our fault. We have known about it since the 1970s. I do live in a desert state, but even here we feel it. It used to snow on Halloween every year, but now I do not even need a jacket.
My family is a hunting family, and they see it. There are fewer deer, elk, and grass. Everything is leaving.
I look at the yellow fields that surround me. Absolute heartbreak comes to me when I realized, it will not be a white Christmas, it will be dead, yellow, orange, brown. And no white blanket of peace to cover it and bring light in the darkest part of the year.
What used to be my favorite time of the year. When it got dark but magically snowflakes would fall from the sky, the shine of the Christmas lights would show them, and it was perfect for hot chocolate. Or in the morning when it would be so cold but you could put on a nice sweater and be warm, walking to class with a cold nose to come into a heated building. Being bundled up to make snowmen. Now I am in agony. No snow, no cold, no snowmen.
I am not a religious person, but I am spiritual. I see the world as our mother. We were born from her. There will be no place to go when we die. There is no other world that our souls exist in, just this one, and she has been massacred. Or, if the Biblical God is real, then he gave us this place. As toddlers, we took it, played with it, broke it, and did not care enough to fix it before we got bored.
Even though every morning I have been waking up in suffering to a bright and dull yellow world, I still have hope. In my prayers to anything that is listening, I beg that the men, who are on their high chairs looking down at the distress of their mother while they count their stacks of money that they have gotten with this death, that they come back to their souls and feel the pain that ones connect to the earth feel, and they stop, and change. Now that it’s closer to Christmas, I pray for a white Christmas.
Maybe it’s all how it’s meant to be. Maybe I am overreacting and this is how the world goes on, and there is nothing we can do about it. None of the people around me seem to care as much as I do. I do not blame them. It’s a scary problem that seems impossible to solve, and one person can go crazy thinking about it. Maybe we are doomed and it is too late.
Maybe she is our mother, and she will forgive us. And the world will come back into tune.
I do not know if this is going to reach anyone. I do not know if anyone can see what I can, all I want is snow. If I ever have kids I just want them to know what normal temperatures are. I want them to have the winters my brothers and I use to have.
During the first snowfall of the year, it was always at night, my brothers and I would bundle up and go outside to run around. When I awoke the next day I would see our tracks from the night before. I could hear the heater running and mom would have put our socks on the heat vent so they would be warm.
