Snowfields

This is the third day that I have treated myself to a walk, this time across the road to the cornfields.  I waited until the snow started to fall and thus, was rewarded with incredible beauty.  I feel like my eyes have been closed for a long time and I am just learning how to open them again.

Today is Kathie's birthday.  We met in 4th grade when the preacher's daughter moved to town.  In my memory, we became good friends very quickly, budding authors with big dreams.  That was 55 years ago.  Sometimes I think we are still budding authors with big dreams, which is better than thinking that we are has-beens with no dreams.

Kathie lives far south of here.  Instead of snow, her birthday weather was wet and dreary, and she rejected my suggestion that she treat herself to a walk.  So I took my walk for her.

And then this happened:

Snowfields (A Birthday Poem)

~ for Kathie

You told me your birth day was unattractive, grey

with sleet and ice. I am so far north of you, I dressed

for snow and crossed my road into fields spent and fallow.

Autumn's harvest ground, stubbled and rutted, a memory.

I gathered pictures for you until my camera battery, unlike

my legs, refused to continue. You will have to imagine

the geese overhead that crackled you a birthday song as well as

the tripod of cornstalks that remained standing in ovation for you.

Oh, and there was the Papakating Creek, sheltering wood turtles

in muck and darkness like promises. On the trek home I focused

on you. Snapshots of the two of us: nine-and-ten-year-old writers,

lovesick teenage poets, bewildered mothers, aging psychotherapists.

I thought about your new floral Doc Martins. I thought about love

and survival. I thought about cornstalks and turtles. I thought

about batteries and muscles and snowfall. I thought about god.

It is fraught, this learning how to live. It is all we do.

I took the walk for you. Home again, I welcomed the fire, steady

and burning only for me. There are cardinals and downy woodpeckers

at the feeder outside my window. Watching them, I wrote this poem,

my birthday gift to you. Here. Open it.

 Happy Birthday, Kathie.  I love you!