MindSpinner

I heard about snow from someone who walked in it yesterday and found the tracks of all his neighbors the animals. I close my eyes now and picture tracks in snow - bird tracks, rabbit tracks, deer tracks. My neighbors the animals make tracks here, too, in the sodden grass, but not ones I can see. We haven’t had snow to speak of this winter, no more than the powdered sugar that tops a cookie.

Outside, night is already black at just after 8:00, but I see a moth fluttering at the window, an early moth, out of season, who would wish for the warmth inside as well as the light shining above my kitchen table if only it knew the heady brew of summer suns. It will beat its wings against the glass alone, without the hum of cicadas to cheer it on or a company of winged fellows to jockey for space at the window; it will live and perish in a cold world without flowers or mate. But still it flutters, for what else is there to do if you are a moth mistakenly born in winter? There is not even a spider this time of year to weave a web to snare it and make an end.

If I could speak some mothen language, I would tell the winter moth that it was not for this season that moths were made. I would conjure for it blooms and nectars, dew on grass at sunrise and June at noon. The moth, in soundless reply, flails a message - white wings on a page of black: timing is everything.

When Katrina moved inland and northward, no longer a hurricane but just a lot of rain, a truck making the circle in our cul de sac veered up over the curb and into my yard at an angle, rolling forward for some 20 feet until its front right wheel reached the sidewalk. The wheel left a rut more than six inches deep in sod so water-logged I might have wrung it out like a sponge.

I have not filled in the rut with new sod - other tasks have always seemed more important whenever tasks are to be weighed, prioritized, and completed. I’ve also been annoyed at the thought of having to buy dirt to fill the rut - several bags’ worth - and seed to sow it. I had enough to contend with already. I’ve resisted the job in a way I would not have had done if I had made the rut myself.

But just now when I look out my window at the blue-purple shadow bissecting the straw-colored grass, the shadow begins to speak of something other than a careless jerk in a truck mucking up my front yard. It is even mum about its rightful spot on the to-do list. Instead it traces as with a careful finger some memorial lesson about what negligence and nature can bring about together whether in an unfortunate city or a soggy front yard. Just now, the rut, my rut, does not need filling up and paving over. It needs to be the blue-purple shadow in the straw-colored grass before the green comes back. When it wants to be something else, it will tell me so.

(Saturday night)

At home in the mountains, at my mother’s, my son and daughter insisted today on taking the big canoe out on the lake. Never mind that the weather is cold and the lake mostly a thin sheet of ice. They broke the ice with their paddles and forged a passageway across from the nearest shore to a stretch of open water on the other side and then back again.

I could see from the top of the hill that the going was not easy, even on the way back. They huddled a little against the cold and brought the boat slowly to shore.

Tonight it has begun to snow, and late from my bedroom window at the top of the hill among the oaks, I can look out across the white expanse of ice to see a trail of dark water zigzagging out from shore into the far darkness, as if water itself remembers the small heroism of two teenagers setting off in a green canoe across an icy lake.

I will remember when the water forgets.

This is the second day Catapult Kid has spent out in the cold with his Guard unit. Surely there are heaters in the tents. Surely. I putter in a warm house and think of what it must be to spend all night in the cold. I think of the thousands who do this every night in the city by the river. I read about a man who carries propane to people weathering winter in tents in Ocean County, New Jersey. I find I am not quite prepared to think all at once of thousands more in each of hundreds of cities. I live in a house with more rooms than people and every one of those rooms heated to a quite bearable 67 degrees.

I wash my son’s sheets and replace them on his bed. Clean sheets, a hot bath, fresh-baked bread and a bowl of chili will welcome him home.

Over at Squirrely Jedi’s this morning, I mused about waiting. I found I wanted the comment preserved here, as a post. I collect oddments in this space as if I’m creating something to last, like a collection of seashells the tides have offered up, though this is an ephemeral medium and though I’m already guessing that I may be hard put to justify the expense of renewing this domain next summer, on its second anniversary. That’s another matter though, and one that can wait until May, when I can print posts out and put them in a notebook if I have to. As child support ends with each child’s eighteenth birthday, we bridge financial transitions. Two years hence, when my daughter graduates and leaves for college, I do not know where I will be - perhaps not in this house.  It may be other people who watch my garden grow - again  - or tear neglected roses out and pave the kitchen garden over with sod for the sake of convenience. But better to have made a garden than not, for there is good in the doing. I will plant and tend this spring as if I will live to be 100 right here in this place.  I will finish the stone path.

I’ve ventured from from the original purpose for this post, which was to capture thoughts on a different matter altogether. Mind you, I never promised to refrain from meandering .

When you have waited for a very long time and the one you are waiting for does not come, you gather up tattered grief into a bundle the better to carry it, for it is yours, and you tuck hope back away into your pocket, where it remains softly alive much longer than reason says it should.

You cease waiting then, chart your course according to your best lights, and undertake your life.

No doubt, you still listen for the voice of one you’ve waited for, and you know you would stop and turn should you hear it. But life is too precious to spend waiting for one who does not choose to come - or cannot.