Gyroscope Review 16-1 | Page 31

Enlightened by Sandra J. Lindow Winter is the season of repose, a lingering meditation of gray days when cloud eyes lower but do not close. Two years from chemo and a year from reconstruction I drive eastward toward a break in the clouds: Winter’s Eucharist, life’s bright meal enclosed between loosely woven linen sky and wide white expanses of snow. As a child, I shaped manna loaves of crusted snow, drank the wine of sky, unaware of ten below. In the shadow of grandfather’s shade maple, I made altars of cloud-earth-bread, a joyful transubstantiation of cold. Sixty years later in a sacrament of sudden January light, I shed my heavy gloves, adjust the heat for hands and feet, and sunlight consumes me this winter’s day, the broken bread of my body eaten and made whole. Gyroscope Review !23