Crunching snow is satisfying. Oh, water, you curious thing! Expanding as you freeze, your artistic statement touches all that is winter. Beautiful flakes, only to intensify in magnification, glide through the air with swan-like peace. I wonder if that’s dismay I hear in your voice as I bumble over your canvas? No matter, I suppose, firewood is needed from the back forty and your appearance is deceiving.
Winter’s play is unmistakable. The stage is set in white and won’t be changed until the final act is played out. That would take three months, easy. Such a length of time, forever frozen in the present! Maybe this trek could be my critique of such drudgery.
Eventually, it’ll retort. I’m sure of it. I’ll make it to the house, slip, and feel the antiseptic sting of chilled indignation. Then I should make it to the living room where its preferred state will mock me from the soles of my boots. Philistine!
It’ll be several minutes before I can relax. Red faces and numb feet are on their own clock. They go in their own time. What tenacity this season has, with its aloofness and misery! Trees become veins in the sky, clawing to feed life once again. Their icy jailor’s bidding is sleep. Silence. I imagine them longing for the youth of spring like I do.
Spring, now there’s a season for the living. New starts, green and lush, push the envelope of elemental confinement. It’s a chorus of the awake and alive, all shedding a load of stiff ideas. I yearn to curry the sun’s favor somehow for everything and everyone.
The cord seems lower than it should. Have I used more that I ought? Was this season colder than others? Was my want higher? I can’t afford to run out so soon. There’s so much left to endure. I shudder to think what I would do without some crutch.
I can see myself frantically splitting more logs from some unlucky tree. Slapdash clothing and burning feet would not prevent me from saving my refuge. My escape. Paul Bunyan would kneel before me as I let fly swings fit to cleave sky. The Spirit would move me and nothing short of the Divine could lay me to rest. I would be warm or die trying.
Two, four, six, eight… oh, can’t I put them all in the cart? No, it needs to last. I can’t be foolish now. I have to keep it together. One more log, and I’ll make it through the night. I think I can make it through the night. It’s so cold. I’m so alone. I’m as lifeless as this snow, and it’s killing me.
© 2013 by Corvidae in the Fields, all rights reserved
Corvidae in the Fields 