all the news I need

To be fair, it seems to be a southeastern Michigan thing, this tendency for the weather, proportional, perhaps, to the number of drivers who cannot handle the snow. NPR reports on the snowstorm in DC, and then breaks for a local update on all the accidents around town. It is my first winter in the fleshy palm of the mitten. It snows rarely here, I have learned—so much so that we are inexperienced in the physics of brakes and ice.

Which explains our abiding interest in the weather.

I pick B– up from the senior center; she attended a program for those with memory loss. She spent part of the time worrying about the weather: if her son would make it from the Detroit suburbs, if they’d cleared the roads yet, what to do about her dog. She knew, because the roads were glistening, that the salt trucks had come through.

We bluster through the drifts to the car—turn the radio up, for the weather. Compare the station’s temperature to the car’s thermometer. Determine which sidewalks have been shoveled. I grit my teeth, recite what I’ve learned from the weather report in her absence.* Que sera, sera! I want to exclaim. The snow comes, despite our science and predictions: arrives at 8 o'clock instead of 10, stays far too long, but disappears all to quickly from the sledding hill. And someday—we can’t hurry these things—the wind will run sweet and damp, and it will be spring: the season B– hopes for every day.

She is holding a set of folded papers in her hand, sprinkled with snow. Poems a woman had brought in. “I don’t get them,” she says. She reads them to me, clear but quick.

“Slow down!” I exclaim. The hibernating teacher can’t resist a brief lecture: read it, again, again, line by line. Even then you might not get it. Or you might not like it—and that’s allowed too.

And then I break all objectivity and tell her what I think, because it sounds too much like her not to point it out.

February: Thinking of Flowers

Now wind torments the field,
turning the white surface back
on itself, back and back on itself,
like an animal licking a wound.

Nothing but white--the air, the light;
only one brown milkweed pod
bobbing in the gully, smallest
brown boat on the immense tide.

A single green sprouting thing
would restore me. . . .

Then think of the tall delphinium,
swaying, or the bee when it comes
to the tongue of the burgundy lily.

*While I deserve to run my car into a ditch tomorrow, for today’s bad attitude, I’m hoping Jane Kenyon will put in a good word with the Fates.