Spring Cleaning the Heart

Sunday morning, and as i look out the window from my computer, I watch the snow falling down slowly but surely. It is April and the first day of Spring has come on gone. I wonder if sometimes Winter doesn't get the message. Or perhaps it is like life. Winter wants to remind us of it's power to sap the desire to be anywhere but right where we are right out of us. It brings with it the cold our bodies have already begun to faze out. We are seasoning ourselves for the warmer weather we have been teased with for a few weeks now. I look it with disappointment and shake my head. I just said last week to my daughter that we still had one more big one coming. I hate it when I am right!
Now my thoughts drift to another season that passed 3 years ago. I think about the promise made that new life would come back to me. I say new life because my life changed totally and suddenly the day that Sheila went to heaven. Nothing would ever be the same for me. Today, my heart is a little like the Robins I see skirting around the bare tree branches, trying to find shelter from the cold and snow. I look forward and think of the warmth that everyone says is mine to embrace. I search through the cold of emptiness that was left for me when she went away. i know that there is a Spring coming that will bring forth new life and a new path to walk. But unlike the snow, the knowing that it will melt away again, I wonder if I will ever truly know a Springtime in my soul again.
With the new season, we find our selves opening windows and "airing" out the house. Out with the old air and in with the new. We clean the windows, floors, cubbies we have stored things in through the winter. We invite in new smells and new sites as the Springtime gives forth it's array of colors. We remember from years gone by that there will be warmth and there will be sunshine galore. There will be flowers to plant and gardens to grow. And in my heart????
Will I too need to open windows from my heart? Will I need to reach into the "cubbies" of my soul and move some things around or let them go? Flowers are to me the memories of our past. They are beautiful and they reach out and warm our souls. I will plant new flowers and watch them grow? Fears well up inside me as I think about it all. Change is nearly an impossibility for me. The bipolar does it's part in making it a huge task simply to accept change. Doesn't change, isn't airing life out, letting go? Doesn't letting go translate into forgetting?
Like the winter that has returned today, my heart, ready for Spring, has filled with snow. I see the Spring that can be and want to capture it and make it mine. But, I think about the "airing out" of the house and heart. I know that habits I have will creep back into the house and each time the windows close, those same habits will fill the house until next the windows are open. The smoke from my cigarettes is likened to the memory in my heart. It's smells and it's calming of my heart will be there. But so too will be the fear that if I open the windows too far... if I clean out too much, that I will forget. My heart can not ever do that. She is my forever love and though one may come to me and be my partner until I too go to heaven, Sheila is always in my thoughts and my memory. She is still the reason I do some things the way that I do them. She is still my tears in the night and my heart in the day.
Ahhhh, the snow... it does not appear to be anywhere near stopping today. I look out at what is already 6 inches and 3 to 6 more to go. I have shoveled and clear off the sidewalk once already and yet you can not see where I cleared it. The same is my heart. I don't know that it will stop anytime soon. Like the snow,it will find sunshine and I have seen glimpses of that springtime and it is bitter/sweet. I want it and see it but I fear it just as much. Funny how a "Spring" blizzard, and that is what we are having today, can take ones mind to places that had HOPED that Spring would keep away. Do I make any sense at all here or is this simply the ramblings of a man that wants new life and new love to take root and grow strong???
Perhaps the heart is like a perennial flower that inside, buried under the cold and snow, lies life that will return every year with the warmth of Spring. Is it so bad to want to love deeply again? Am I forgetting if I go forward and leave winter behind? My heart is so heavy and my mind so full. Sometimes I just want to go away!!!!!!