Untitled - CSUN ScholarWorks - California State University, Northridge

64
As a child growing up in the late sixties and seventies, I
lived in a small city located in central North Dakota, a state
known primarily for its relentlessly flat landscape and its
severe winters. Because the winters were long and hard,
often stretching from late October to early April, snow, ice
and biting wind are woven through all my memories--a
high contrast to the warm, softly lit interiors within which I
engaged in intense reading marathons under old blankets
and quilts piled high and heavy, forever framed in my mind
by the biting windy sub-zero elements just outside the
window.
In the days before cable, the three television networks
routinely showed their holiday movies and shows in the
weeks between Halloween and New Year's Day. I
remember watching The Wizard of Oz every Thanksgiving,
the Technicolor red red slippers on Dorothy's feet that
glittered so magically on screen enchanted me temporarily
away from the black and white text in my books. This may
have been the only time of the year my ob session with
reading was interrupted for any length of time. While most
of these shows were tame and light-hearted, one in
particular, The Snow Queen, seemed to darken the night
outside the windows, while the story reached its long
mythological fingers into my young chest and my breathing
became shallow at the satisfying icing up of my heart. The
familiarity of being told something you know. The
recognition of something present but not spoken out loud,
of sadness, of fear, of pain. The loneliness I felt deep inside
that I tried to fill with book after book and childish
fantasies.
I do not know why I was attracted to this darkness. I
had a relatively uneventful, secure, happily cluttered life as