MEASURING WINTER /f
- The looming white winter landscape—blurred by dream. The fog is still with us.
- Thirty-six hours of rain have washed away six inches of snow; now water dripping from the gutters that weren’t cleaned yet of fallen, pale brown autumn leaves. You worry about potential ice build-up in the Arctic days to come and jot down a reminder on the chartreuse post-it notes to text the family landscape guy, who has become an odd friend.
- The pines, colossal sentinels against the obscured sky, lack any discernible symmetry; their hawk, invisible, cawing into Tuesday.
- Buddha, in the blue light, motionless; still up to his chest in snow in what is left of the winter garden: truncated rose of Sharon and butterfly bushes that preened fuchsia, lavender, and dusty pink origamied petals just six weeks ago; the errant sweet pea at a standstill high up your privacy wall.
- Four pieces of mail: two bills, a credit card application that you won’t qualify for, and an advertisement for solar panels on the house you somehow afford; no Christmas cards yet.
- The white plastic bird bath [the ceramic salmon-colored one that cracked last year, finally thrown away] held down by a stone removed years ago from the sea you didn’t manage to visit the past two summers. Sigh.
- You find the tape measure in the broken drawer of the chest in the garage and measure the distance on the wall map to New Zealand’s White Island where yesterday a volcano erupted in a tourist location—6 confirmed dead, 8 missing and presumed dead, over 30 hurt. 17.5 wooden inches; 8,750 miles; according to a later Google search, 8,783. You’ll measure again tomorrow in morning’s light through the garage windows.
- Death causes you to remember the news anchorwoman who delivered the local news on Friday during supper like she did for 33 years and didn’t wake up on Saturday.
- The new fleece-lined slippers are still magical and warm; you’ve properly refrained from wearing them to walk the dog across the street to the empty lot where he likes to go after meals. A pat on the back in order, a hot chocolate with a heaping fist of baby marshmallows; tiny faces afloat in the froth.
- Side B begins [the day job over] on the couch under the picture window that frames the still-dense fog just as the towering streetlights flick on. No YouTube, just rain.
- Dinner can be fetched from the freezer [or maybe New England Clam Chowder from a can since there is milk in the house] and eaten at the counter like a horse; no one has to know you live this way—the floors without sweeping; the scattered rugs collecting particles you don’t usually notice; dust bunnies, and more dust; last month’s mail, too many notebooks to count though you’re tempted.
- Then the dream from the morning fills you again—lost inside the moon, a cocoon of milkweed-silk-sadness wrapped in light; looking for your father, the one who sent you there.
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Beautiful Krysia, David
As gorgeous and and simple and open and perfectly melancholic as anything I’ve read in a good while.
Thank you so much, Yoshioka! I appreciate your time reading and commenting! Happy end of 2019! Krysia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHlzcF9YkQA
how lovely! Thank you!!