the title.

I grew up in Texas where it's warm most all the time. I often wore shorts on my birthday, which is next month. Shortly after I got married I moved to New England and met winter head on. It snows here, and it's cold. I've enjoyed the past five winters quite a lot, actually, once I got used to it.
We decided a few months ago to move back to Texas, and I'm really happy about it. I thought that knowing this was my last winter would make me really savor each snowfall, each biting cold wind, but I was wrong. I'm very winter-bitter. It's cold, the snow is nasty looking right now (see photo), and it's flat out HARD to live in a winter climate with a toddler in tow. I'm what I've dubbed winter-bitter. (of course, just as soon as winter ends, I'm headed back into a Texas summer which will surely have me longing for New England.)

But back to my title. I took that photo out in front of my house today--it's gross, month old snow on the ground, but today it's melting because it's beautiful, unseasonably warm today. The sky is blue and there is a warm breeze. It's in the sixties.

This morning I looked outside and I felt hope rising up inside me....that feeling New Englanders get around here in March and April when you know the winter is ending, a tingly feeling all up and down your arms and a joy so pure you almost can't help but smile. The world is fresh, a time of new life once again, the pain and cold of winter over.

That was bubbling up from within.

And I knew I had to stop that hope because it's January! The beauty and promise of today a fluke. It'll be months before that freshness, that joy, that beauty will arrive to stay. . .and certainly between now and then there will be times I fear that the spring will never come. To hope otherwise, as a resident of New England is dangerous.

Infertility is my own personal winter. It's cold. It's ugly. It's painful and it's even HARD to do with a toddler in tow!

My spring? The thing is I'm not sure. There is a story to my life whose conclusion I cannot see, though it has been written. I hope it includes more babies. (I even hope it includes more pregnancies.) But I am not the author, so I wait. And in this case, I'm going to hold on to the hope, however dangerous, because the giver of that hope is is the one who loves me most, who wrote the story, who knows the end and who made it all work together for good. I can trust that and I choose to today.

Here's to hoping dangerously.