Vernalization

Part 1

This winter feels different. A winter storm snow-swept our state, burying our region under 11” of powder, light as perlite. What’s different this winter is that the snow is still here a week later. A warm-front never arrived to render the ground into its usual freeze-thaw icescape. The recent full moon illumined the night’s underbelly with the help of snow’s albedo, or ability to reflect light. Any brighter and the world outside would be a mirror. Any colder and the air would coalesce into an icy tooth that bites.

Walking down our sidewalk, I see grass for the first time in a week where my husband had shoveled. Its paleness and limpness reminds me of the sog and mud to come. The paw prints that will dapple our mud room. The grimy, wet underbellies of our dogs and the smells that accompany that. But that’s still a long way’s off considering that the temperature will rarely rise above freezing this month.

The sky is the darkest shade of white. Everywhere I look is a sheet of paper washed with grays and browns. I developed a practice of allowing my walks to inspire something that I make with my hands. What I make with my hands does not have to be good just like this essay today does not have to be good. And nothing needs to make sense or come together.

The scrim of ice on the river is necessary and birds gather there to drink from the black vein.

The icicle hanging from a gutter says whatever you say it says, but says it late.
The snow is a bank where the blue jays store and lose their riches.
And the purple finches are the color you have been waiting for.
It’s nice to see color that isn’t the cardinal.
And the seeds under our steps sleep in vernalization.
It is a patience I wish I had, staying hard until things turn.
Until the snowmelt and soil-shift are messages beckoning warmth.
And the smallest tendrils inside us crack through the crust of ourselves,
and shove granules aside, one instant at a time.
I wouldn’t mind being such a thing, half seed, half feather-light thing
like milkweed, dogbane, fleabane, or dandelion.
That gentle float, faux snowflake, non-binary above the cities
and their exasperations blooming up in indeterminate inflorescence.