warm signs

A January thaw and last night’s rain melted layers of snow, revealing
artifacts left like fossils in rocks through the past month or so. On the driveway above the barn, I found fox
scat, still partly frozen, but inches above the dirt level. When did he visit,
I wonder, last month, two weeks ago. What timeline is say, maybe 10 inches down? Melted snow is hard to determine. I would like to be able to read the layers as
rings in a tree, dating the passerby. Further down, near to the frozen ground, I see the colorless body of an
earthworm, almost white. Surely that was
left from the last rain before the ground froze solid for the season. Boot prints, paw prints; evidence of my
comings and goings crisscrossed layers, back and forth to the barn. Those, I know are mine, the cats coming with
me to the freezer, gathering again the summer harvest.  I
started to think about all of the summer fruits; the berries we have with our morning
oatmeal, all collected last summer in the heat, in the sun. That’s when I remembered, it was time to strain
the elderberry liqueur. A sip of this by
the fire will bring some light into the grey days.

And grey days we have. While friends tell me of the spring like
weather to the south, sun and mid-fifties, we experience early spring, wet grey
30’s here, beautiful in its own way. (I tell myself the saturated air is good
for the complexion, a good change from the dryness of the heated house. Believe
me, you can tell yourself anything.)

sometimes.. it works.