Winter Morning in the Writing Space

Hello Dear Ones! As I am creating this email, we have just emerged from the multi-state winter storm. The main roads are clear, but our little side road is still snow-covered, as are most of the cars parked on the street. It looks like an indoor kind of week. So, I found it so sweet that I found this draft in an old journal. It’s a bit of a mess, as it unfolded over lots of unrelated tangents in my journal for that day, but I am hoping that I have lifted out enough to be able to polish it well. I hope you can read it with a warm beverage and a blanket someone made with their own hands.

It has been two days since the thick first snow.

I have not walked on the trails.

The soft organic parts of myself are turning

to machine and gray slush.

I am of the indoors now —

of screens and forced-air heating,

of food stores in a humming machine,

bought in a well-lit store after dark,

rung up by a Titian-faced teenager

doing everything to stop the casual flirting from the man in line behind me.

I sit in my protected space, coffee steaming,

day reaching across the skylights above.

Somewhere outside, the sweet winter birds

leave tracks on the snow-draped hedges.

Their music returns my earth body, reminds:

We are of this place together. We are made to know one another.

I am the keeper of that bird, as she is the keeper of me, even

as I sit behind this glass, just dirty enough

that she will not fly into it

and hurt her precious body.