Sunday, January 18, 2009

Surprise Me God - Day 6

Today was a surprisingly relaxing day. Heather and I are extroverts, and what that means is we will most likely accept invitations to anything. Our our days are usually packed with seeing people and going places that we hardly have time do do what needs to be done around the apartment. Today was not that day, entirely.

For once we got to sleep in. Thank God for that. I woke up and blogged about the previous day and spent some good quiet time with myself. I like the time in the morning when Heather is still sleeping. There is a quiet innocence to the day, like a new born baby. It's that time when you haven't started thinking about the day ahead of you yet because you are still halfway asleep and in dream land. I have to think that heaven might feel a little like that. No cares of worries, just the infinite possibility of a wonderful day ahed of you.

The great thing about this saturday was there was nothing pressing or urgent about the day. Our plan was to clean, go outside and have some fun because we could be out for more than 10 minutes and not freeze to death (let's here it for 17 degrees above zero), and then rehearse with Kate and Steve for Sunday morning. Everything went to plan and it was a wonderful day.

Heather and I love to snowshoe and try to get out whenever possible. That usually means whenever we head to northern Minnesota. There is always somewhere to snowshoe when there are woods around you. The city is a different animal all together. There just doesn't seem to be the freedom of walking out your door and just going in the city. I started looking up different places we could go, parks, golf courses and other recreation areas. All I found were snowshoeing programs and guided nature walks. Not what I wanted. I was getting a little frustrated when Heather suggested that we just walk along the river. What a wonderful idea. I didn't even realize that by living where we do, on the Mississippi, we CAN walk out our door and be in the "wilderness". We walked about a mile up the edge of the river, on the solid ice part. I wasn't about to fall through the ice, that was not a surprise I wanted. The wind was in our face and it was snowing. It was beautiful. One of my favorite things about winter is how quiet it gets when it snows. The sound is absorbed and the constant roar of the nearby interstate is lessened to a hum.

While on our walk we found some ice heaves on the shore. They were about 5 inches thick and very clear. It was pretty amazing. No doubt the river is mostly frozen because of the cold lately. Still not enough to venture away from the shore. After we turned around we had the wind at our back and followed our tracks home. We could see the bridge over the river in the distance and I wondered if anyone could see us walking? If anyone noticed bright orange and green specks on the snowy river. It didn't matter, we had found solitude in the middle of the city and it was wonderful. A fantastic surprise.

Dain

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