A Midwinter’s Tale

For about ten years, from my teens into my twenties, I spent the night of December 21st at a cabin in the woods with John and Doc Colella, a son and a father, and two of the best friends I'll ever know. They’re both dead now, but I still think of them nearly every day, though as we pass through the solstice each year, they utterly fill my heart, my memory, my soul, and my interior sky.

Maybe John knew what we were doing the first years we went up, but I sure as hell didn’t. I just liked being invited. John was so brusque and cool, while his dad, Doc, was entirely different than anyone I’d ever met. To my mind, and in my experiences back then, compared to him, most people were like cookie-cutter patterns. Or perhaps, better, it was that he’d started with one shape, but it didn’t suit him, so he punched holes through walls and scraped chunks out of the level parts of himself until he was a wholly unique form.