MISSING WINTER

Today is January 10th and this is what it looks like out my cabin window. It is in the low fifties, and despite the beauty of the day, I am lamenting we have no winter.

The ground is bare
and brown.
Dried and broken,
nearly beyond recognition,
leaves scatter themselves in the breeze,

and as I walk back to my cabin
my feet cannot avoid the plethora

of pine cones
littered in my path.
I do not mind the
crunch, crunch, crunch.

Still I ache for snow
on this January day,
when at 50 degrees
it seems more like spring.


My skis,
forlorn upright soldiers
lean against the too
warm bricks
of the basement wall
dejectedly,
longing,
longing as do I
for the shush, shush, shush
of winters past.


Longing for the woods,
for the densely white silence
that opens up
and takes us deeply in
until we disperse
our cellular structure
and are no more.

And there just alongside our spring, the grass is winter beautiful, but it is days gone now, for it is no longer cold enough. I pray that global warming has not so altered our seasons that we bypass winter...where silence and beauty prevail.