Yes. It was too soon. I sit at my window and watch the snow come down. And more. So much more. The snow doesn’t just come down. The sky is filled with it, over filled with it. And the ground, the trees, the sky, the universe, everything, not just covered in snow, obliterated by it, remade by it.

So that when Murph comes up to me and puts her head in my lap, so that when I know it’s time, I have to go through my closet where I have already hidden my scarf and my gloves. I am sad to bring them back out.

Outside, in the crisp quiet bleak, in a vast under-developed photo landscape, surly pedestrians walk with their heads tucked into their chests. Dark souls grieving with delay walking through the world darkly. I raise my head up and walk into the snow. My head up, my nose up, my face into the angling squall. Where Murph pulls on the end of her leash in the park I watch the snow come at me, hit me. It’s like the movies. I’m flying into a starfield. They crash into my skin. Sharp and cold. I stick out my tongue to catch the snow. My tongue was warm and coffee-coated and the snow instantly cured it. Do people watch? I don’t care. I close my eyes and feel the cold and the tiny little brilliant bites. And open my eyes again, at last, after my crystalline trip, squinting into the darting snow.

When I stop, as if waking from a secret dream, I look around. Murph is confused. And the mid-afternoon foot traffic is bundled and quick as if, by rushing through it, they might manage to hurry winter’s last stop.

SS