This tiny bit of warmth

Wednesday, March 04, 2015

The ice drips off my front porch awning; but with no real relief

Spring hasn’t arrived and seems at times it never will.

This is less a complaint than an observation, and a need to renew, as if age makes healing from old wounds more difficult; this season projecting on the outside world, how I feel inside.

This dripping a lot like dripping tears as we embrace new storms that seem to stretch out ahead of us for the rest of our lives, this winter like few other winters clinging to our heals like a rabid dog, snarling and biting, but never so deeply as to inflict a fatal wound.

Forecasters looking back claim this has been one of the coldest winters in recorded history, and refer back to the winters of 1985 and 1979 as examples, those years when I still lived in a cold water flat in Passaic and watched the river there fill with chunks of ice – just as I watched the Hudson fill with ice this year, emotional-filled years of change that I still recall with the vivid sting that winter’s kiss brings.

This inside/outside weather forecast never predictable except in hindsight when we look back and see how these chunks of ice clogged our arteries and created havoc with the slow thaw of approaching spring.

Winters like this make us ache all the more for spring, even though such wishful thinking also eats up time we otherwise wish would tarry, as we rush ahead to the worst of all winters when there will be no thaw.

All this morbid thinking comes at a time when we get a temporary thaw ahead of yet another predicted snow storm, and we try to cling to that small vestige of warmth the thaw has given us until we can bask in the real thaw, if and when it arrives.

I used to stand on a bus stop in the early 1970s clinging to a cup of coffee as I waited for my ride to work, this small bit of heat allowing me to thaw inside while winter raged outside. Sometimes, this is all we have, this cup of coffee, this tiny bit of warmth that keeps our veins from turning to ice, this idea that we shall soon see spring, and renewed hope.