Winter Notes

 Winter in the northeast   

l   The first  bright winter bride glides her way across the landscape,  swirling a trail glistening with clear, sharp, white gems winking their prismatic rainbows across the early dawn’s light.  We are spellbound, scarcely able to absorb the beauty and the radiance of our local scene bewitched.  We reach out to accept the landscape’s wedding invitation, eager to embrace and join the dance of winter hope.

ll  Angular, grimy, the early April hag slumps among the snow heaves. Destitute and exhausted, swathed in salt and grit, and lashed with twigs, she is appalled at the last storm she has  ushered in.  Brutal plows carve gloomy, grey, ghost ship  seas parting the dredged waves so that  hunched scarved people can pick their way mouthing a funeral dirge to the end of winter.

 Winter in the southeast

 l     Tire tracks in the sand, a child races to the sea, careless of the seashells crushed, skittering sandpipers, and startling starfish.

Swell and song seep into him and the swivel of an eye catches the fluid curve of a dolphin arcing in the distance.

Idly fishing from a spindly pier, a man muses at the unconscious grace of the child, his animal delight in splashing through the waves before bursting  slick, shiny, newborn from the waters and the mischief of the day.

ll   A tympany of thunder crescendos as lightning rips the sky. Gouts of rain torrent the live oaks swamping their Spanish moss beards.  Leather palm fronds are battered, torn and beaten. A sweet gum branch beats an uneven tom – tom on the leaking, screeching, roof.  Feral cats creep beneath deafening cars.  Dogs cower and flinch.

Indigo clouds pale and thin as a risky lizard darts to the precarious shade of a bottlebrush tree only to be doused with a baptism of jungle rain.