Graduating to Wet Stones

A Bad Season For Confessions Late February and the snow gray, and after seven p.m. orange in places wearing a mask of fluorescence and speaking, calling out its death wish: "Come with me." I told someone once how the snow calls to me, sings to me, and how I flee from it. It calls, but I remain here so reasonable behind my doors. It calls, even if I'm wrapped in a moment of silent comfort, bound by sleep. It calls with its gray-white death call. It wants me to lie down with it, letting the white shroud fold and unfold around and through me as I slip out. I cover my ears and drink chamomile tea. I turn on Rachmaninoff but the snow creeps through and with it brings a dissonance like a bad dream: a woman with her raven's arms flapping from her cage till exhausted: "I confess, it calls all winter speaking through dawn and moonlight and it will not be silent. It will not." It is a bad season for confessions. And yet I am in love with it. It speaks to me of generations, generations of my women. Back to Helena a great great something mother of mine, who came with her husband from a more gracious climate and was forever disgusted till death, at the Midwest- November through April. I dream the first of May and the snow comes breaking through the Spring sky. Or it is hailstones, but it's all the same- ping, ping, ping like tiny stones chucked at the windows. And the doctor says, "Don't worry! It's only snow." My gray-white ladies are the thousand cries a woman makes in her lifetime. Flake by flake, stone by tiny stone.

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