I should have known how it would be today.   Something was wrong the moment I got up. Fear of weather again.  Blizzards. Snow two feet deep.  Rain and snow, freezing cold and  then sixty degrees.   The sky opening up and falling, falling down on you. I fell down three times this week. I was walking straight up as a pin and the next thing I knew I was on the ground sideways.  Then it happened again and I was on my hands and knees.  A third time it happened at the corner while I was fumbling for that stupid iPhone and it and the purse and I went flying.   My bones must still be pretty strong because I got right up dusted myself off and went on. My knees look like someone whacked them with a baseball bat, but the bruises are so pretty like the dusty blues, purples, greys, and golds of some other planet’s skies…. just like your eyes that winter you fell down and painted a picture of what falling did to you…

It was grey and the snow had already landed. The world white again.  I walked on the path along the park and the daffodils, tulips, and irises were covered in snow.  One daffodil at that Polish doctor’s house was already blooming and now looked sad lying down. Like a what?  A what?  Flowers in the snow are weird.  The last time I remember flowers in the snow completely was May 8 the year my father died.  The snow covered all the tulips and not just the leaves like now. These tulips were already blooming in red, white, pink, and yellow and they were covered in snow.  A robin had died in the garden too. There were drops of blood all the way to the back door.  I have witnesses. They all saw it– snowy tulips and a dead robin who had also just had enough.

Something keeps falling from the roof or maybe the gutters or eaves.  It comes crashing down sometimes like rock or gravel down a mountain. Very early this morning there was a very loud crash like someone coming through the door.  Ordinarily I would fly out of bed and run downstairs to see what the commotion was.  Put up my dukes look for a bat or rolling pin for protection.   I just lay there.  I didn’t even care.  Come in if you want.   Rob me murder me.  Throttle me.  Nothing could batter me any more than this life already has the last few years.

It was probably just the ice and snow, some animal getting caught in it. Gnawing on the icicles, eating the snow.  Rolling around in it like some drug. I would love some drugs. To make everything go away.  I know now why Johnnie used to drink Chardonnay in the morning before he went to work.  He had enough too.  He’s dead now.  I used to give him advice on how to keep going.   Eat better..  exercise.  Walk.  Listen to music.  The best one:  “Johnnie, go out and buy yourself a little plant,  a violet, or cyclamen or geranium and just put it on a table or windowsill and look at it, the beauty of the leaves, the flower shape, the perfume, though none of these have a perfume… water it, nurture it, take care of it…. see how the light shoots through the cyclamen and turns it into a blazing bird…..”   He only loved his cat.   And booze.  Books. And his harmonica.   He couldn’t care less about flowers….I gave him recipes told him how to make simple nutritious foods….. thinking back now I realize how futile it all was… he must have laughed at me or worse, cursed my  hollow advice…. because I understand completely now how you can just drink yourself to death….

Or maybe take a hike into the mountains on a very windy snowy day.  Just walk and walk until you turn blue all over and freeze to death.  Anesthesia. Oliver Reed’s character did that in “Women in Love”. I always loved Oliver Reed.  His big brute of a body and face.  A fighter, who even in real life fought like some hooligan.  Bar fights, women fights, war fights.  Turning blue, walking in that blizzard he looked sort of happy…sorta kinda maybeish…these are not real words…they are fake words…..

I tried to explain snow to a woman I shared a cab with the other night from the opera.  The mystery and magic, the absolutely muted silence of a snowy day, that turns even a very ugly urban street into a panorama of transcendental beauty… a zen dream an ancient breath an earth shattering silence  ” I have had enough of this white stuff”!  she said.     “… enough already.. I hate winter.. I can’t wait for it to be over… I  love the desert… the cactus  they are sooooooo beautiful…..”. Even though we have only had a few days of winter and basically spring for two months…. she bemoaned the white snow and was so adamant about it,  I just finally shut up as the cab rolled on and the snow made everything silent…it even turned the land along the expressways more beautiful  the sky more starry the moon more translucent… the alley we pulled up in behind her house was snowy and white and the trees were in full bud, and seemed to be sighing…

The moon this morning.  I felt something behind me looking at my back, and I turned around suddenly even though I knew I might fall again…. there was snow and ice and melted spots…. the moon — I had to see it, I could feel it watching me… so like Orpheus longing for Eurydice I turned around for a quick look…it was a slice of pale mother of pearl…. a very thin slice pasted on the grey almost opalescent sky but the moon even more opalescent..so thin, as though someone had taken off a piece with a razor….

The moon was tilted back as though someone had given it a gentle shove.. like someone sitting in the garden in the summer on the lawn in a semi comfortable chair and it tilts back a little and the mouth makes a little oops I think I’m falling…. the eyes slightly wide and the eyebrows arched… the moon looked more ghostly more feminine more alive and more sad, just like a little puff of air soon to be gone……

The moon had a mouth and it was definitely open and it was trying to tell me something.     It seemed to be sighing and it almost looked afraid as though all the planets in the sky were heaving as though all the snow in the world will suddenly be falling and everything alive will be drowning… but I kept walking and walking and breathing and I kept thinking  about Oliver Reed and his blue face walking up that mountain the icicles forming on his eyebrows and eyelashes and his lips almost freezing, and even though he was freezing he seemed happy and the moon even though it was slipping away just barely lighting up the sky it appeared to be smiling and shimmering and breathing slowly slowly and almost evaporating into a new shining planet even though to me it was only saying goodbye….