February 25, 2019

The Shortest Month

          The landscape thaws and refreezes, immortalizing the mailman's boot prints like a snapshot.
          The ground's surface is a dirty meringue, a white sheet thrown over summer memories. We walk like penguins to the car and back. 
          The branches of the lilac quiver in the north wind. Snow tires pull into the driveway with explosions of ice that fail to break the ennui.
          Blinded by scarves, we walk the dogs down the treacherous street on a trickle of macadam. Salt can't touch this stuff, and the iron blade of the ice scraper bounces off it like a basketball.
          Everybody makes their meetings, and the potlucks are jammed. The ladies are playing bunco every week without breaks. All this will pull apart like the heel of a sock this summer, when the tourists come. Our winter empathy—the huddled town itself, the banks and furrows along her sidewalks, the lights in the windows of City Hall at five, the homes with their stacks of firewood peeking out from under cerulean tarps, all this cookie baking—will cool on the first warm weekend of May, and we will become independent again, a little embarrassed by our hardy fellowship, our stockinged feet held up against the Jøtul, the puddles from our boots ruining the hallway floor. 
          Winter is hard.
          And I wonder what will become of my own tenacity and resolve—when I can go outside in just a T-shirt.
          But that seems impossible, now.
          And there's all of March to get through, if only we could start it.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Gorgeous, vivid writing, Bill. "And then there's all of March to get through...." What a gift you are!

Suze28 said...

Love love love