Full Circle

As a child, every autumn brought anticipation. I would lie in my narrow bed, listening closely for the first song of Canada geese.

At that young age, it seemed almost as if the geese brought winter to Texas. They filled the air with their dark, arrow-patterned clouds, riding wind currents ahead of winter’s first blue norther.

Shortly after their arrival, temperatures dropped nearly twenty degrees in as many minutes. After our long summer, the welcomed chill sent us scurrying for quilts and sweaters.

These birds came to glean what was left of maize and corn from the barren pastureland surrounding our ranch. Each fall when they returned, they were like long-lost friends who brought the gift of winter with them.

I grew up on the coastal plains of south Texas. My grandfather’s “far pasture” was a mere stone’s throw from the Aransas Wildlife Refuge. We sat directly on the central migratory flyway. In this part of the world, seasons change subtly with the direction of winds and the songs of birds.

So what does all of this have to do with Alaska? When David and I drove into Deadhorse, I laughed outloud and told him that I felt like I had come home. I was surrounded by coastal plains. I could smell the sea again. Marshes, while crusted in snow, looked like the ones from my childhood home. The rain and damp, chilling winds felt exactly like a Texas winter day. I called my mother to tell her that after 6,500 miles, I had wound up right where I started.

Yet I also found something tremendously different here. After all of those years of seeing Canada geese, I had never once seen a gosling… until Prudhoe Bay.

I was absolutely mesmerized to find that I had finally come full circle. Raised in the winter home of such splendid birds as North America’s only two cranes, the whoopers and sand hills, and Canada geese and terns and peregrine falcons, I now knew where they nested and fledged their young. I knew the origin of Arctic winds that in a few more months would blow southwesterly all the way to a sliver of Texas coastline. And I, myself, had now driven the distance and direction those beating, slender wings fly as they migrate each year to bring the song of geese to wanting ears.

The words of Ecclesiastics fill my head… to every thing there is a season. Above the Arctic Circle in the summer of my life, I found my childhood home in winter.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
(Ecclesiastes 3:1-11) 

Yet again, I am grateful and humbled at the gifts of this season. My prayer is that you also find the blessing of coming full circle.