The Way Winter Wears

Papers are finished and graded. I’m home in California, where it’s warmer by twenty degrees and considerably less snowy. The air here is damp all the time, though. Even when it’s sunny, the coastal damp hangs invisible in your sweaters. I’m colder here, by far. I wish I were more relaxed, but well, I’m not. I corralled the long-ignored tasks from the weeks of paper writing and finals stress, dumped them in a folder and now they lurk here as well. PHD applications. Student loan business. Letters I’ve been meaning to write for ages and ages. I forgot to pick up some dry cleaning last night and I woke up in a panic this morning. Old habits die hard, they say.

So, in faith, I write:

“Winter’s here,” She sighed and pulled the expanse and weight of down-filled white around her middle, “and I’ll never be warm again.”

A month before she’d filled the trunk of my car with fallen leaves so that they spilled around my ankles when it opened. She was thoughtful like that. There I stood, at a gas pump in Lancaster, Pennsylvania with the New England fall condensed about my feet, laughing to myself. The pay phone line had crackled when she told me, “You can take it with you…see!”

I still haven’t vacuumed the bits and grit from the carpeting.

Now the clouds seemed, having once been fleecy, to take a cold distance of slate-like canopy. The crisp breezy had become a harrowing howl. The leaves of autumn had long been bagged and shipped away. And all her rambunction with it. I’d returned, but she’d retreated into a cocoon of bedridden boredom. Of tea and television. Soup and solitude. She lay like seeds underground, waiting to blossom through the snow.

This morning she’d awoke in last night’s clothes. The party I’d dragged her to had murmered collectively with the fervent solemnity of deep January. Everyone smoked a little more and the drunkards’ conversation was of challenges more than triumphs. So rarely was agreement found and two young bucks had locked horns in the yard, spilling across the frost and ice. I’d got her home, but she burrowed into the bed made for guests on our sofa and would not be moved. I slept alone in her bed, most of the heavy sheets and covers pushed down to the floor. I’ve never needed to be so warm.

She’d long stopped turning her back to change and the t-shirt fell across her breasts a veil that bespeaks the covered. I sat the edge of the bed and she stood before me, a bare-skinned pilgrim, and I pressed my lips to the skin at the hollow of her hipbone, just below the hem of that shirt. She laced her fingers through my hair and clutched weakly.

“Will it be like this every winter?” she asked in that far-off way.

“Here? Maybe so.” I pressed my temple to her waist and looked across the field of empty clothes that led to the door.

“It’s harder when you leave.”

“It makes a difference if I stay?”

“I think it does.”

“I couldn’t anyways. You know that.”

“I know. ‘the cost of a future somewhere warm’” She parroted what I’d written across the collage of used-up plane tickets.

She plodded in her bare-feet to the window and pulled the shades. When she returned I spun her round and down across the bed, and for a while her hands about her hair and her thighs about my ears. Later I’d lift the shades and sit with a book over a steaming cup of coffee by the window. In a few moments, she’d emerge at the steps of the building and light a cigarette.

At the bottom of the next page, I’d look up to see her seated on the snow and crying.

When I finished that chapter, I’d looked up and she was by my side.