The light is returning.

After spending two weeks in New York (mostly in my parents’ basement, helping to construct two massive Star Wars X-wing fighter jets that Santa hadn’t noticed were intended for teenage boys gifted in spacial relationships) over the holidays, where darkness descended by 4:30 in the afternoon and the forecast in the paper called for three consecutive days of “ice pellets,” I returned to New Mexico like a junkie desperate to get my light fix. We almost didn’t escape before I slipped entirely into withdrawal. Our early New Year’s Day flight out of Islip Macarthur airport was canceled due to “ice on the runway.” Suspiciously, it was the first sunny morning of our trip. We figured the pilots were hungover from New Year’s Eve. Sensing our desperation and having witnessed my crazed expression while talking on the phone at 6:30 am to the Southwest agent who said the next available flight out of Islip would be in four more days, my parents took us across the Long Island Sound on the ferry and drove us all the way to Hartford, Connecticut so we could fly out later that day. Jack and Liam were thrilled to spend a few more hours with grandma and grandpa and to add a new mode of transportation to their repertoire.

January is still frozen here too, with ice chunks floating down the river. We can’t get out the back door of our house because of the snow that has slipped off the roof, rumbling and groaning like an avalanche and I feel sorry for the donkeys who live in the field across from us when the night time temperatures dip into the single digits, but there is bright sunshine every day and the afternoons are beginning to stretch like they’re just waking up again. We’ve been skiing and ice-skating in the warmth of the sun which has been like shooting up with endorphins, melatonin and seratonin all at the same time. And since our family seems to have inherited some obsessive compulsive tendencies, this has been a very good thing .

Speaking of which, Liam is ticcing again. It happened for the first time this summer in New York, after he’d been chased, knocked down and scratched by a dog. It was a cute and fluffy little dog, but terrifying for him nonetheless. He began scrunching his head to his shoulder in a habitual contraction. Seemingly comforted by his daily routine once we returned home to Taos, the tic disappeared. And then, Jack began twitching his nose like a rabbit, which I attributed to allergies. Over the holidays, Liam began clearing his throat incessantly, and Jack added an interesting little head turn to his nose routine . My physician’s assistant sister, Christina, is clinically accurate when she points out that Tourette’s Syndrome generally begins appearing this age, but since this information evokes images of my boys barking and blurting out vulgar obscenities in unison (which I know is an unfair and inaccurate stereotype since these are rare symptoms of Tourette’s) it’s an understatement to say that I’m kind of hoping that this falls more into the transient tic category, which apparently is quite common among six years olds and outgrown – at least according to my book about six year old development I found at the library to which I’ve been clinging like a life raft. That, and all the light.