For Montgenevre

Around November the air starts to smell crisp and cold, and it always reminds me of the year I ran away. 

I was a bit lost, passively heading towards the end of my job contract, not wanting to renew it but also unsure what should come next.
 
Someone passed on my name and before I knew it I'd had a phone conversation with a woman I had never met, and agreed a day. I found a replacement for my house share, packed my bags and got on a plane. When I arrived in the ski resort it was cold but the snow was yet to arrive.

The anticipation hung heavy in the air, a normal mountain village waiting waiting waiting for the magic to arrive. Advent is like this. waiting waiting waiting for the saviour to come and renew us once again.

waiting for hope waiting for purification.

When the snow finally came the excitement was palpable, people gearing up for the season, lift passes and freshly waxed skis, there was a feeling that anything could happen. Overnight the village became a winter paradise all trace of the banal gone under the spectacular white coat. The mountains took on a blinding new beauty.

It was the tenth of December when the snow fell that year.

By March it was melting, much too early, running in dirty rivulets down the chalet drainpipes.
By March my heart would be broken, my face bruised and I would be longing for home.
But I couldn't know that. Not then.
It was early December, and I was poised; ready for it all.

This is the feeling which comes back to me every year at this time. the feeling of a great adventure just around the corner. A chance to rewrite who I might become.

I came back from that time a sadder, wiser, stronger person. This has become synonymous in my heart with the season of advent, hope and uncertainty, sudden joy and the significance of a time of great change.

I recently found this piece of writing about Montgenevre that I wrote the following year but never shared;

Sometimes the remembering hurts.
It can double me over, this longing to be back where I was daily soaked in beauty, inhaling it with every breath until it was reflected in my own eyes, my own skin.

Time worked in strange ways those winter months; I shared a tiny bedroom and sat freezing for hours in the roof of the little wishing well for just a bit of stolen space.

The people around me were beautiful and hurting, escaping and making for themselves a life, of sorts. I think that they were boldly hiding. The longing for something more, thick on their breath in the icy air.

I don’t know whether it was the season, or the romance promised in every clear and starry night, but I fell so hopelessly in love and was badly hurt, sobbing into my worn sheets. 

But there was healing also to be found, like the day that I cast off loneliness, dressed up in a ridiculous sunshine yellow ski suit and paraded through the town to make a friend smile. 

and in the freedom, oh the boundless freedom of the steeps and slides of the mountain slopes. The recollection of flying down through the untouched snow with the wind in my hair and joy so full in my wild heart will stay with me ever long.

Those days were so precious. I can still see myself waking up with the dawn, putting mittens on my chapped and weary hands.Walking across the snow to work, eyes, which should have been bleary but instead were wide and alive with wonder,

Captivated, by the God of the Mountains.