4 February 2007
Good morning, my sweetheart.
I miss you so much that the degree of my longing melted all the snow off our roof overnight. Last night was very cold, 2ยบ or colder, and all the streets and sidewalks, porches and stairs, railings and mailboxes; the skins of the trees with their branches and tines; the window glass of automobiles parked outside; all of them, in their slick new coats of yesterday's wet snow, froze immediately after the sun went down. Yet I heard a trickle, late, from the eave above our bedroom window. I stayed awake after our telephone call, reading Nigeria in your magazine, the same article you'd read, fingering the corners of the pages whose corners you'd already fingered, growing more and more alarmed about the price of our oil, and the costs of it, moral and human, and as I read my worry grew, as did my alertness, so that I was even less sleepy after an hour than when I'd laid down to read myself to sleep. Finally, the anxious global ringing in my ears gave way to the gentle, hopeful dripping of water, a steady pluck, pluck, pluck, a reminder that, even on these coldest nights, desire counts, winter gives way, my lover will return.
This morning there is a pool behind our house, and a few of last year's ample leaves, freed from under snow, float carelessly in the water that is still too warm to freeze. There's a funeral next door, and all the mourners travel our stone pathway to the church. I call to them from the second story window to be wary, for the red bricks, even where shoveled, go so slippery in the cold. One by one they nod their thanks. A careworn gentleman in a long black coat and handsome cap, walking alone at the rear of the group, pauses to call up: Have you seen the pond in back? Yes, I tell him, I have. It's the damnedest thing, he says, those goldfish survived the night. It's love, I tell him. It's always love.
Yours,
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