Winter Tale

When did it start?  January, I guess.  When I discovered the ice creeping up the inside of the second floor windows.  That’s when I began hearing it like a quiet whine.  When I started looking for ghosts in the hallway and somehow expected to run into one sipping tea or swishing skirts, but just generally going about its business like she knew all along.

It never was a ghost.  I cursed my way through another session of scraping the windshield of my pickup.  Shivering violently, I waited ages, ages for the fucking engine to warm up.  How could the sky be so grey but the snow shine bright enough to sting my eyes?  Somewhere past the backyard the river was still flowing.  I would get these elaborate ideas in my head that I would walk down there in boots and coat and mittens to watch the icy current.  Maybe they would see me from the street and think how tortured I must be, how picturesquely tragic.  But it was too cold for anyone else to be walking around near the park anyway, so I just got into my truck and drove to Meijer. 

We had started out that winter watching Hitchcock movies in the front room.  Vertigo.  Rear Window.  Rope.  I used to think I hated old movies.  Assumed they were yet another affectation of the people I knew who prided themselves in being moderately counter-culture. 

Then one day, I was paging through my roommate’s art appreciation book and I settled on a street scene.  It was an early photograph of a street I know I had been on when my parents took us to the City in the 8^th grade.  All those men wearing hats.  The fruit stands and the dogs sniffing around for discards.  They never thought they were going to be art or history or anything to be appreciated.  Not like that.  They were just living their lives.  I got the dizzy pit in my throat I used to get when I would think about outer space and I had to slam the book shut and walk around the library. Digging nails into palms and biting the insides of my cheeks, pain reminding me I’m still inside of my flesh.

I started noticing them as much as I could. Not the storyline or the dresses.  But the eyelids.  The individual teeth.  Things these long-dead actors didn’t give a passing thought, but that proved to me they were once as alive as I am.  And how someday I’d be equally dead.

Those weeks of hot panic have passed.  Now I’m just moving through the house, watching the street through the curtains.  Perking up when the heater clicks on from the ancient basement.  Not thinking of the wet boots I pull on and off throughout the day. 

Image:  Lake George Window, Georgia O'Keefe 1929