Wintry Mix

Here he goes again. “Listen here, boy. When I was little, it used to get cold around here. How cold? Don’t give me that look, boy. I’ll tell you how cold. It was so cold you would split logs using just a hammer. It was that cold. You’d hit the log once with the hammer, and it would go 'pop' and jump into pieces. It’d splinter. That’s cold, all right. I’d run out there and break up a bunch of wood with just a hammer. That was my job. And I didn’t even have gloves back then. You know how cold that was? Gimme that bottle.

"And I'm not even gonna tell you about my old man, and what he was like. No. No, sir. Not gonna talk about him at all."

It was the second or third month of cabin fever season. Him sitting unshaven on the couch in a frayed t-shirt with a captive audience. Me. The bottle nearby. The ashtrays overflowing. The stove pumping out its dry heat. The console TV flickering with nobody watching. And a view through the small, frosty windows of large, unpleasant things falling from the sky into fields already covered with deep snow: some ball bearings, sleet, ice cubes, plaid Barcaloungers, pointy scrap metal, old weather satellites. At first having school called off was OK. I hated school. After a month, it wasn’t so great. There was nowhere to go. Everywhere there was waist deep snow with a thick turquoise Formica crust. Furniture and space debris and hardware falling from the sky. Roads like an unfenced luge course. Winds screaming and shaking the house. The dimmest of yellow light in the early afternoon. And him.

There are now 67 days until Spring. And today there is wintry mix.