Brown Winter
It was a long winter in this bonus time of my dying,
no blizzards, almost no snow at all, no tractor
with the new snow-blower rumbling the dark.
It was frozen but brown, then warm but brown,
the beautiful birches still a daily highlight
among the other trees’ full dormancy,
stands of them, crowds of them, thickets
of woods not yet cleared by cows that will come,
to graze and transform the world after my time.
More things that seemed impossible:
Will I live to see a cow delivered to this land?
The answer is the same: Depends on the fencing.
Of course, it depends on more than the fencing.
I continue to discover more ways to think of time.
Meanwhile I appreciate brown winter, visited
by eleven deer daily on the brown ground,
eating the broken prairie, large yet camouflaged,
and a housewife parade of turkeys, in winter coats,
balancing their weight in their three-toed shoes,
single file along the prairie paths from fence line to barn.
Our single pheasant, untouchable in all seasons,
remains regal even without a snowy throne.
I had imagined in November a James Joyce funeral
with people brushing snow off their shoulders,
shaking out their coats, stomping snow from galoshes,
as they entered the minimally adorned dark church.
Instead, my bedroom-bound life in my beautiful sanctuary
of peach curtains and blue Christmas lights has given me
a brown, dormant view. Last night, I went to bed sad,
but awoke in a morphine-induced joke,
laughing as I saw the post-dawn brown winter
when I passed the bathroom window.
How can more life make one sad? Why complain
when we had all the requisites of a white winter, too.
We did have hoar frost bejeweling for days
along the trunks and branches of the white pine,
and the more dramatic glazing that shone in the sun,
Making it seem the birches would ring like glass chimes.
Scarier for tree health but most beautiful, we had
inches of heavy, wet snow, holding on and holding down,
bending the boughs until wind shook them free of their load.
Even one impressive squall of a fluffy half-foot
easily blown by leaf blower, swept by broom, compressed by car tire.
All these I’ve seen this winter and even photographed.
But the overall, everyday impression is of brown.
The disappointment of false predictions:
How much did you get? It missed us. Too bad. Us too.
Now it is March 6th and the birds are coming back,
early spring when one thinks of planting again.
My head is spinning to think of another season
after saying goodbye to the garden for good last fall.
I must evaluate again: I am not dead but not well enough.
My husband asks if he should bring me the box of seeds.
I agree but remind him I don’t leave this bedroom now.
I’ll watch from this window and wait for cows.
And I must also construct new funeral versions,
romantic visions that fill the church for send-off:
a muddy trek to the gravesite in a cold wind,
the church filled with daffodils and tulips
or leftover Easter lilies that people admire
as they collapse umbrellas or take off spring jackets,
and fill the pews in any-color-but-white.
Black was once the color of funerals
or more formal ones. Are even family
required to wear black suits anymore?
We will leave that to James Joyce’s day, pre-Vatican II.
Remember how those reforms were meant
to throw open the window and let the fresh air in?
Brown winter is coming to an end, so let us all,
whenever death comes, not unpack our black clothes.
Be it spring, or even summer, let our imagination
move with the seasons’ beauty and the promise
of life everlasting, prepared to enter however it comes.
*the allusion to James Joyce is to his story/novella “The Dead” in Dubliners, especially the arrival in the first few paragraphs of the Conroys to the party scraping and brushing off the snow, paired with him watching the snow from the hotel window and thinking about death.
