in the snow

12 hours of rain, followed by a sun-down freeze plus continuing gusts of powdery snow and the sidewalk looks and feels like sugar coated slop. It’s like walking on butter cream frosting and I haven’t worn proper shoes. Step, step, slip. Step, step, slip.

My umbrella isn’t much protection against the snow gusting from all directions. The wind continually grabs at this feeble protection, giving it a hard yank. It wants in. It wants into the downy folds of coat where I hide. It wants in to my imagination for some empathy. It demands that, just before my legs and fingers go numb, I experience some empathy for all those mice I dispatched to rodent-after-life via my freezer. I’m lucky, I have a warm home that I rush toward. The powder filled wind demands that I consider the condition of those with no warm destination. Many wander with only this cold as their abode.

Some wander off and the world goes cold around them. It wasn’t this frigid 11 days ago. On that day a little old lady with some mild confusion wandered out of her nursing home. Maybe she just went out for cigarettes and took a wrong turn up the straight road leading back home. Maybe something caught her eye and she simply forgot for a little too long. Her senses come and go and usually when she meets up with them she doubles back and returns to her destination. She comes back to 3 meals a day and a warm quarter of a room. But this time, perhaps before logic could kick in, but after she’d just walked far enough away, the temperature snapped down. “Where did the weather trap my wanderer?” I ask of the growing powdery drifts. Surely she’s been seen by some snowflake. Can’t any of you tell me?

But as the snow covers evidence and muffles sound, it returns only silence. In it I see only my search.