12
Hello, December.
I was not expecting you so early this time,
but here you are: punctual and festive.
I'll have to lay another plate.
I walk out from the lee of the building and the wind hits me like a cold sledgehammer. December is not subtle; it roars like a raging beast, driving wet white wedges of snow into every chink, every nook it can find. The light is short and wan, the sun unsmiling on days it bothers to show up at all. Pointillist snowflakes dot-dot your windshield, and frost steals in sharp-edged curls over windowpanes at night. December is the death of the year, when every last life is extinguished and a glimmering white pall settles soft above the carcasses of fallen spring soldiers. Chunks of snow lay in the streets like the ruins of a civilization. From between deer-hewn pine branches, chickadees twitter out a brave defiance of the stony, pale quiet.
Right now the snow is light, and falling in little papery piles off my shoulders and down my back. Each flakes glimmers radiance under the flickering streetlights and the full December moon that peers through the stormy cloud cover. The footprints behind me are already sunken and drifted; the wind bites at me and tangles the ends of my scarf up around my face. My eyes close against stinging, whirling slivers of ice that jump up from where they lay scattered shining over sculpted white mountain peaks.
I was not expecting you so early this time,
but here you are: punctual and festive.
I'll have to lay another plate.
I walk out from the lee of the building and the wind hits me like a cold sledgehammer. December is not subtle; it roars like a raging beast, driving wet white wedges of snow into every chink, every nook it can find. The light is short and wan, the sun unsmiling on days it bothers to show up at all. Pointillist snowflakes dot-dot your windshield, and frost steals in sharp-edged curls over windowpanes at night. December is the death of the year, when every last life is extinguished and a glimmering white pall settles soft above the carcasses of fallen spring soldiers. Chunks of snow lay in the streets like the ruins of a civilization. From between deer-hewn pine branches, chickadees twitter out a brave defiance of the stony, pale quiet.
Right now the snow is light, and falling in little papery piles off my shoulders and down my back. Each flakes glimmers radiance under the flickering streetlights and the full December moon that peers through the stormy cloud cover. The footprints behind me are already sunken and drifted; the wind bites at me and tangles the ends of my scarf up around my face. My eyes close against stinging, whirling slivers of ice that jump up from where they lay scattered shining over sculpted white mountain peaks.