Skating on Thin Ice

Ice Skating

 

SKATING ON THIN ICE

Too many indoor days bundled
together drew me out into the record chill.
At the pond in my old hometown
a few hardy souls I didn’t know
were skating in ski masks
in the early winter dusk.
With my camera I froze
their silhouettes against the shimmering ice
like pinned starfish.

I could be crazy,
a crazy craving headlines,
at any cost,
so I tried to be subtle
with my snaps,
keep my zoom lens distance,
not alarm the nervous parents
in parkas on the dock
waving their children in.

I stood on the treed shore,
remembering solid-color snowsuits
and Wonder bread bags in boots,
hand-knitted mittens, and laughing
slides across the same ice
without skates.
Back before fake news and Facebook
our parents shooed us outside;
they trusted our judgment
and the good will of others,
and we trusted the winter ice
to stay solid
and unchanging
beneath us.

Eviction Notice

You! What are you still doing here? Didn’t I tell you your presence here was only temporary???!

Snow Pile

It’s April! You have overstayed your welcome! And you are dirty and disgusting like Jabba the Hut! NO one wants you here!

I’m serving you an eviction notice. I have brought both the rain and sun as my deputies….You are done you lazy loafer! Be gone by the end of the week!

SPRING

An Open Thank You and Welcome to My New Followers

Sunrise Over the Snow Pile

Good morning from the New Artic (I mean New England)!

I want to say “Thank you” and “Welcome” to all my new followers!

I will come and visit you all and thank you individually as soon as I can. I have been a bit snowed in lately, by the weather and by life’s complications: an accident; a death; and snow, snow, and more snow!

View Out the Window

See you (and spring) soon, I hope! 🙂

It’s That Day…

That winter day when I wake up and say, “Enough!”

It’s supposed to snow AGAIN today. Not much, just a couple of inches this time, but the amount doesn’t matter anymore…it is just that feeling of:

NO MORE!

It’s like I have come up against a WALL of snow and I just sat down in it. Snow has smothered and buried all my ambition and imagination like these flags…

Okay, that seems like an awful lot of DRAMA for you people who aren’t putting up with it…but really, it has stopped me from going out and walking (I’m afraid of slipping on the ice, which I already did  luckily without injury, on the way to the dumpster). So…no new photographs. So, what to post? Here’s one from last year…a bunny taken through the window.

I went digging through my old notebooks and poems looking for something to post. Ah…here’s a rough draft poem from last year I wrote after taking this photo…hmmm, same time…February. Maybe it is just…

WINTER.

I can’t think –

Storms one after another

Have bent the trees to their limit,

Bent my emotions to extremes,

Debris is everywhere.

Top branches clutched in the grip

Of ground snow

When they should be reaching for the sky.

It’s not the time for clean up and release,

There’s another storm coming.

It’s only important to clear a path,

Back-breaking and spirit-breaking as it is,

There needs to be visible hope

Of an exit,

A true escape route.

My thoughts of spring hunker down

Like the bunnies…

Though I saw one

Brave one, huddled amongst

A grounded treetop, desperately nibbling

at the buds it shouldn’t have been able to eat,

desperate times

desperate measures.

But the calendar whispers

Time change ahead,

Spring clean up to come.

Be strong, be ready.