I tried to complain as I poured the coffee, but I know it will fill the dams and make the grass green.

A few days ago, before the snow came, the old stuff was working hard on melting, so we bundled up the girls and went to pet the horses and my husband took my dad out to feed the cows.

It was the first time he’d been out on the ranch since the end of October when I sat with him in my car, watching as my husband, uncles and neighbors loaded the calves up on shipping day.

I looked over at him then, and even though the doctors said he was on the mend, he was still in so much pain. I knew somehow the road was going to be longer.

And it was. It still is.

We don’t want to be weak when we were once strong. We don’t want to be lonely when our homes were once full. We don’t want to worry about the end when we’re trying hard to live in the moment. We don’t want to rest when the sun’s shining, and there’s so much to be done.

But that’s what sickness does. It robs you of detachment and forces each moment on you. And the word “moment” changes too. In pain and worry, it stretches out before you for miles, like your engine’s sputtering on a lonesome back road. In hope and healing, those long moments turn into a reminder that it’s all so short and fleeting.

And there’s so much you could have missed if you weren’t granted another one.

I’ve only had one near-death experience in my life, one where I wasn’t strapped in when my car went rolling too fast off of I-94. But I was a teenager and invincible and barely phased by a bruised head and broken glass. I walked away with a lesson on safety belts, but my moments weren’t tested the same way my dad’s have been these days.

“I hope I can get better. I’d hate to fade out like this,” he said to me as he sat in my easy chair and I bounced my baby in the sun streaming into our house, illuminating the dust, bits of Play Dough, toys and chaos that new little lives leave behind on the floors. I don’t know what I said then except it was probably some dismissive, reassuring quip like, “Don’t worry, it will come slow, but you’ll feel like yourself again.”

And my sick dad — working so hard at recovery — will probably not remember those rushed words, but I will never forget his and the way they hit me as I held our growing baby who entered this world during the moments he was desperately trying not to leave it.

And so the winter’s been long enough. And I’ll take the snow to fill the dams and then I’ll welcome the sunshine, because there’s so much to do.