(Views from the cross country ski trail)

It’s been a rocky month filled with aches and pains, both mentally and physically but Wade and I are doing our best to stave off the threatening challenges in our lives. His working hours have increased and I am upping the ante on mine, doing the best I can to hone in on my talents and unabashedly sell my writing to create some extra financial support. My usual humorous and playful attributes are hiding behind my veneer of confidence.

In my Aspiring Writer’s Group, over at Mom Bloggers Club, I came up with the name SEAPODS for those of us who are determined to make something out of our writing and who deal with the mixed emotions that rejection spurs on like self pity, empowerment, anger, exhaustion, forced positive thinking, optimism and desperation .

Spring fever is helping to raise our spirits, at least for the boys, who are bringing out their lacrosse gear and throwing the ball around in the warm sun but for Wade and I, where spring fever invokes a different kind of restlessness, the romance will have to wait until we schedule a weekend away. For now we stop with our eyes half closed to sleepily kiss good morning as we pass each other on the stairway and we continue to have impromptu clandestine meetings in the closet. I miss him and relish every short but sweet interaction, the brush of hands in the kitchen as we fight for the coffee pot and the flirtatious text messages that we send each other during the days.

Sometimes it all gets too much, the stress, the fear of what lurks around the corner, the sorrow for our friends who are struggling worse than us but we all forge on.

I do my best to push everything aside and reconnect with the children because they too suffer from the strain of the poor economy and so I went on a school field trip to the Snowmass Cross-Country Ski Center with Axel.

When he got off the school bus and ran toward me with a big smile on his face, his golden hair shining in the sun, all my troubles melted away. It’s always the children who bring rays of sun back to the dark.

He and his two little friends relished having me all to themselves, without any teachers berating them with rules, and they took me on their adventurous tour around the fields, spurting forward with abounding energy and than tossing themselves head first into the snow to cool down.

Axel’s best friend

At the end of our breathtakingly beautiful day with a clear, blue sky and surrounding mountains swathed in a white blanket of snow, Axel and I went off to enjoy our time alone together and I again listened intently to all that he had to say.

“Brevitt worries too much. He’s like Mr. Murry Mouse, a skitter, scatter, scurry mouse, a flurry-about-in-a-hurry mouse,” he said referring to Karma Wilson’s book, “Mr. Murry and Thumbkin.” As we shooshed through the sparkling snow we developed solutions to cure Brevitt’s high anxiety problem.

That night Axel brought out his guitar to play for us for the first time. We sat and listened, holding back our comments that he was strumming too hard and totally off key and I smiled fueling up for what troubles the next day would bring me. Bring it on, I thought to myself, bring it on!