A Winter Tale

A WINTER TALE The pond froze during January. The water met a sand and stone beach where it created a plateau. Round bellies and bodies of pebbles rose like backs of whales from the clumpet; reeds immobilized like young boys at war stood before my sister and i. With our gloved hands we pried stones and hurled them in discuss fashion to hear their electric tapping as they danced out of sight. The pond to our smallness seemed more of a lake, stretching about two city blocks from shore to shore. A drainage pipe, cancer ridden and broken, segmented like a millipede, ran from the street beneath the sand and hung over the water. There was a basin below the end of the pipe where the water would never completely freeze. Small chunks of ice and melting snow was constantly falling into the bowl; splattering and crackling the thin sugar-glass every time it began to form. Snow would begin to fall and collect on the ice towards the center of the pond where geese and ducks held congress. At the edge, where the water lapped onto the exposed dirt, there was abandoned fishing tackle; line tangled around underwater foliage, a rubber worm half eaten wedged between earth and floe. The colour of the water was Gustav green and motor oil fading into the haze of thick ethereal ice, which led to the thick white snow at the crown of the pond. The opposing banks were heavy with militant trees. Beauty leaves stolen from them while they slept through solace September, waking in the dangerous frost frigidly naked. Their gray bodies draped in cold unforgiving white shawls. They seemed elderly and desperate, envious of the evergreens and poison oak. Where the algor island rested with its poultry inhabitants, there once was a floating dock, I remember a friend and i swam to it. We dried ourselves with grammar school talk and a big baking sun. He and i, we were cool, reptilian. He has died since then, the day he left was coincidentally my father’s birthday; overdosed and abandoned the dock forever. But big white winter world saw none of this and the snow kept falling like the bra-strap on a skinny girl. It just keeps fumbling down in layers. On the bank, beneath the willow tree, my little sister (who will end up mother like most little girls) fell on her back and slid her appendages. Snow piled in an askew outline. Her wings were picayune, spread from nose to naval; the area of her legs looked like a dress caught in a wind-swooshing to the left. i wanted her to lie there a little longer, watch the innocence of a young child and give me faith in the world; but the snow would soak through her clothes. The bleak dirt road that ran parallel to the small farm where a few months earlier i had harvested pumpkins; previous summers laid irrigation pipes and maintained crops; was now level with fresh snow. The road wound down to the pond, behind the homes, curved to the left fifty-feet from the water and dug into the trees. It was this route that i would take to the pond later, after Michelle was home and warming her pink nose. i would take this way alone. With Greenleaf’s poetry biting as hard against my tongue as the wind `gainst my face, i wandered into the innards of the woods; leaving mythic white-elephant everything behind me. With veins cold and tight like telephone wires i journeyed up pygmy hills; around thistles and poisons and between boughs and trunks. They led to the silent place in my life. It was an insignificant cliff no more than fifteen feet above the water with a pair of trees five feet apart. i slid snug and secure, watched the birds deliberate unknown politics and listened to the occasionally falling object that always sounded metallic against the ice. i saw milky flakes tumble to earth, swimming this way then that; faeries flying with no destination. Poison that was creeping across the path, up the trees, trying to spread in every direction was slowly buried beneath the new world. The snow fell hard. The limbs of the willow tree fared me well from the adjacent shore, shaking the snow from its arms. The angel-print would only be a dent as though she floated from the sky and only rested a second at the spot. My tracks shallow, the island of snow slowly transforming into a hill, and my fingers brittle they would snap like twig. It was when i began thinking this that i flicked my cigarette and headed towards home. My father would be watching television, loosely slung in his recliner; eyes fixed on something in another realm. Mother would be in the kitchen, cookie dough under her nails; baking the last of the season’s batches. She would be making talk with Michelle who would be waiting on me to have her hot chocolate, and was stirring a big bowl with a wooden spoon. i would naked myself, dress in warm pants and shirt, walk passed my father in one of his old cardigans hoping he would jest me so we would smile. The path passed him was silent. He was too tuned to some glimmering ghost worlds away. i walked by, shoulders hunched forwards, back broken in half, limp like the wet clothes i shed and were hung on the line. Hot cocoa was, for my sister and i, warm, personal. Every sip was a pair of arms wrapped around our innards; gave comfort to a cold place. We stared out the windows, seated in the kitchenette in our silence; both reflecting on the earlier part of the day. She was in a place long forgotten by me of innocent-dreams and i was focused on the poor resolute fact that already the day was a memory; filed away to be summoned in lonely times. Spring always came, all the angels decaying, displaying the earth bone structure we so happily forgot. The cocoa mix slid shamefully to the back of the cupboard, snow soaked clothes gave way to chlorine stained shorts. The pond resumed its murky, holocaust gloom colour and old men threw their lines; cracking the glass surface. The last of their hopes beneath the algae that hung heavy like rain clouds over their bait. By next winter they would have run out on life while sister and continue compiling memories to be sifted through years later.