The Winter That Never Ended

Yesterday, I put on my shoes and a jacket and mumbled, "Gotta go outside so I can write about it later." I sat on the garden swing for a half-hour, and a couple of goldfinches fought over the remaining seeds in the feeder on the pussywillow tree.

"What am I going to write about?" I asked them. It seems I've reached that point of the semester when assignments are burdens, books are dead weights with print that bounces off the surface of my memory. Ideas are fleeting.

When we moved in here, the house was on a corner of two roads. About ten years ago, a new (third) road was put in between my house and my neighbors', setting my family's property on a peninsula of grass and giving access to the backhoes that dug up the woods and planted suburban fake-estates in its place.

Behind me, beyond the fence along the new road, the sound of cars blended with the sound of the wind. The gray oily clouds gnashed and whirrled in the sky. Last week, I could hear the grass growing as spring rainwater trickled into the cracks in our clay soil. Yesterday, I just sat there getting cold.

"What am I going to write about?"

I kicked at the mulch under the garden swing and noticed the trees on the hill across the hollow. They're just as stick-y and dark as they've been all winter, but it looked like someone had spilled a little white and a little red on their branches. A little cloud of color. A smudge on my glasses.

The color of spring is yellow. Yellow crocuses, yellow daffodils, yellow buds on the bush by the garden shed that I can't identify. Yellow pollen on the pussywillow, yellow goldfinches.

A few months ago, I dreaded the spring. I couldn't conceive of a bright and cheery season when I was so sad. But I'm sick of being sad. I'm sick of cold winds and heavy skies. I want the weather to pick me up and carry me away from grief.

I left the swing, checked out the baby daffodils behind the garden shed, peeked in on the redbud tree my mom and I planted a couple weeks ago, and returned to the house.

An hour later, it started to snow.


:30°F:
:dark and cloudy sky: