An Ode to a Winter Morning

The first morning when the weather turns. You know it well. There is a bite in the air as you unbury your body from the bosom of your bedding. A blanket that feels like safety. The best part of your day is that last moment of wake brain at night that keeps you going sometimes just a little. The little death, tousling up within the downy embrace and losing your consciousness to the longed for sleep state. Rest. Tingling shivers begin to lattice their way up and down your exposed skin as you swing your feet out to start the day.

The air is an edge and you thin paper being pressed upon it.

As you move through your home that coarse, grey, chilled light sits in the corners of the rooms and watches you awaken to it. The temperature has dropped and the cosy has deserted you, leaving the rooms alien and enlivening. Dry chapped lips and flaking skin kindle a fire of their own as you rub your hands against one another hopping foot to foot into socks, sweatpants, slippers and hoodies to hide the exposed human hide from the grip of the wintering.

In these hours, the world is you and your family alone. You knock a cup in the sink and the oceans quake.

Bundle up and brace those peepers. Holy white-light peeks in along the outskirts of the window blind. “Musta snowed” you murmur as you lace-ish up the snow boots and sort the hot goods, the precious parcel, the ambrosia for the awakened ones-coffee. The season is beginning, long it will last and come and go. There will be days when it feels like summer in the deep midwinter because the blue sky is singing a song of sunshine and the white snow is solid and fluffy and the chill is hiding. Temperatures soar; you remove your down jacket and hat and feel the unfurling of a seedling soul. Those winters are the magic, releasing ones. There will be days when the darkness endures beyond what you think you can handle. When the wind cuts the skin from the bone-a carvery-and the sludge of the leeched brown snow-shit hybrid clings to your clothes, you feel damp and dismayed as the empty grey above beseeches you, “why bother?” Those winters are the impossible, keening ones.

The door inches open, a resistance you shake the crusted ice from the frame and clap those air filled puffed cheeks of the winter wind in on themselves. Release.

Standing outside, a cronch that reverberates through the bone stuff. Snap, crackle and pops give underfoot and a giggle rises up. Raising your eyes you look about, ears tuned to the heavy silence that enshrouds and absorbs. Aliveness. Though winter usually comes with much death, but maybe a death to a layer needed to shed to release what comes next. It’s all great and it’s fucking cold. The skin grows taut across the face, the nose reddening, the ear tips supernaturally toasty in their fluff cave of wonders.

Sigh. A puff of the coldest exhale, the cutest breath to strike you all year. Blackened, naked tree limbs ache towards the earth, the sky. Dig in, she thrills.

Alright winter, let’s be having you.

My first American Home

South Bend, Indiana.

January 2019.