Winter’s Dramatic Conversion

“Really,” he said, “I’m not one for sunflower and birdsong.

It’s just too precious, too easy.

Gray skies are poetry. Frozen earth is pure scripture.

A good blizzard is benediction, with all that black crystal slicing the air…

That’s a living color portrait of the soul.

It’s all ice and razors in there, you know.”

Then Winter shuddered in his thin coat, and drifted off

his lonely way. The shadow of himself hovered above the ground,

hesitated,

and followed after.

The warm wind sat still, watching.

Her name was Spring, and

she was taken with the whole picture of him—

that young face with ancient eyes,

that swagger of morbid certainty,

the upturned collar of a tortured poet…

He was not her type.

So of course moved faster than the shifting sun.

Of course she wrapped herself around him

risking those first purple and white blooms

to his frost-bitten touch.

And of course her mother was horrified. (Really, isn’t that the best part?)

But this is what they do, the artists of air and light.

They can’t keep their hands off each other.

He might have frozen her in her tracks; he might have sapped the color from

the air that she breathed, the wind that carried her, and

turned to sleet what she meant for rain.

But as it happened, she was more than he saw coming.

As it happened, even he was tired of the cold.

Even he had grown weary of drizzle

and bitter winds

and dry, aching knuckles—poetic and true as that suffering might be.

So who knows if she stormed and raged and blew him over,

or if she baptized him on the spot.

Either way, in the end,

he agreed to lay down and die for awhile.

As those in love so often do.

Thanks for entertaining my horrible Victorian cliches of personified seasons.  This is March on the prairie though: shoveling sidewalks like mad one day, and then everything is sunshine and happiness. Until it snows again. So bring on the cliches. The dance of winter and spring is as fraught with sexual tension as any forbidden love–a story as old as the hills.

I, for one, am hoping that Spring blows him over, sooner than later… Let all be sandals and sangria and baseball season! At least until the tornadoes land.