Winters in Wyoming can be brutal. We’ve had days of negative 20 degrees, the cold so harsh you can’t even swallow. Winters in Wyoming can also be deceptive. This February for instance has been incredibly inconsistent. One week it is beautiful with temperatures ranging in the high 40s and 50s. The very next week the wind and snow push temperatures back down to the 20s. It makes for a wide variety of clothing and a dismal mental state when “fake spring” repeatedly knocks at your door and then runs away and hides, creating a months-long game of ding-dong ditch.

I am well aware that cabin fever is used in regard to life on the sea, but I have come to adopt the term for my restless state of mind waiting out the Wyoming winters to give way to real spring. I am currently in that feverish dilemma as just yesterday it was a balmy 57 degrees, but today it is spitting snow in a frigid 23 degrees. Wyoming is not for the faint of heart when it comes to wacky weather. 

Today I am stuck inside when just yesterday, my pup and I were enjoying a walk as the delicious rays of sun warmed our bodies. I hate this back and forth. Wyoming weather is such a tease. She entices me with her unusually sun-filled days reminding me of the joy that spring days hold, only to yank it all back and instead give me the used dish-water gray-like color that corrodes my mood and sends me careening into a state of gloominess itching to escape to sunnier days and cheerier skies.

My Grandpa, I know, feels it too. Mostly as an ache in his bones, arthritis submitting to the deranged weather changes. But he unknowingly cheers me up as the sounds of his melodic piano drift down the steps and to my ears. I’ve heard these hymns, these melodies and songs, for nearly four decades. I can’t explain the way he plays, only that it feels like home. It surrounds my soul in comfort and makes me feel unexplainably safe. When he plays cheer comes back and despair cowardly crawls back to wherever it hides out in my complicated brain.

I’ve been inexcusably distant this past couple of months. I hide out in my room a lot. I isolate myself in these weird months of winter. I blame it on the tiredness I feel from days at work. I blame it on my irritability and need to refresh myself in solace. I can’t really put my finger on why I’m not as willing to be more present in the household. Maybe it’s laziness. Maybe it’s that seasonal affective disorder. I think it’s just the cabin fever that drains me of all anything. 

Until Wyoming can make up her mind on the weather, you can find me outdoors entangling myself in the deceptive warmer temps, or inside longing to spend my days in the heat of summer and my nights on the patio in the cool fading light of sunset. And, more often than not, you’ll find me humming along to the merry melodies of my Grandpa on his piano.

“So the last will be first, and the first last.” Matthew 20:16 ESV