LETTERS FROM HOME: MESSAGE FROM MEXICO AND THAT SONG ABOUT THE FROZEN MAN

Jan. 7, 1999

Dear John, Karin, Christien and Inga,

Thanks for the Christmas card from Puerto Vallarta. It arrived during a week when Cape Girardeau resembled a sno-cone. Amidst the snow, ice, sleet and freezing rain, life here has seemed frozen in time.

The groundhog in our next door neighbor's yard has disappeared, and DC is dragging a laundry basket full of weatherization supplies from room to room. She has replaced the latches on the bedroom windows just in case a mythical winter tornado blows through Missouri and she mourns missing the year-end TV show "Top 100 Weather Disasters of 1998."

Not that we are completely moribund. DC left for a party Saturday night by sliding down the hill in front of our house on her rump. She thought that mode of transportation safer than walking on the ice.

We attend this party every year because we like the hosts and because they always erect a Paul Bunyan-size Christmas tree in their foyer. Everybody stands under the tree, in awe of both its size and the householders' willingness to embrace Christmas so magnificently.

No imagination is required to visualize John in Mexico teaching algebra to the children of expatriates and enjoying the sports he never could in Garberville. Surfing, sail boarding, Bohemia drinking.

In the photograph taken of the six of us on your deck, John looks like someone born to do all those and maybe write his Western novel in Mexico. The svelte Karin shaking up the tennis world on Banderas Bay is not difficult to imagine either.

But the Christien DC and I are holding onto seems barely big enough to walk. Now he's a guy, a guy with a soccer mom.

Inga is wearing a flowered dress like her mother's and smiling mysteriously as she examines something in her hand. If any of you can speak Spanish yet it's probably Inga though I wonder if you'd know it.

I admire the way you live your lives as an adventure, not worrying about security. As much as we pretend otherwise, there is no such thing.

We are all trapeze artists. Artistry requires letting go of the bar we're on and flying through the air to the next. You can't be a true trapeze artist unless you're willing to let go.

Understandably, when you move back to the U.S., you want a warmer climate than Garberville's. Who are we to blame you?

Frozen trees, frozen cars, frozen.

The weather is a reminder that habitual ways of reacting and thinking produce the same old experiences.

In James Taylor's eerily beautiful song "Frozen Man," he imagines the feelings of a man whose body was found frozen in ice a hundred years after his death.

"I know what it means to freeze to death/and lose a little life with every breath

To say goodbye to life on Earth/to come around again/

Lord have mercy on the frozen man."

Some of our friends sent along photographs of their children at Christmas. Ivy and Kasten in Northern California, Jack and Emmy in Washington state have transformed our old pictures of them with new growth.

Children are symbols for the growth all of our lives are meant for. We older children must tend to our emotional and psychological and spiritual selves as our physical selves peak and wane.

A warm sun melted most of the ice yesterday, turning frozen fields soggy and raising spirits if only for the moment. We are snug but can hardly wait for that groundhog to reappear.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.