January 2024

Here’s is the news: That one-eared cat is still coming around. The wolf came and left. Christmas comes down from the walls and folds up in the attic before the baby is christened. The days are cold and short, but there’s a stove lit in the living room keeping us warm. The girl’s been painting portraits of me.

Here’s the old: The long nights are here and about their business. There are more stars than we know what to do with. More stars than beings to look up at them. More than enough to put a few in our pockets, and rub between our fingers when it’s day again. 

The snow came through. I’m sure you heard. Nothing else is that quiet. I’d tease the girl for all her waiting, glue-eyed and smudging her nose on the window, if she were watching like that for anything else. She doesn’t pray for it, doesn’t bargain. She just watches, stuck somewhere between begging and believing, waiting hours in her boots and hat and mittens, saying “Please come. Please come. Please. I know you will.” 

And it does. The snow is called down. The snow on the cedar. The snow on the roof. The snow’s secret map of where the rabbits are off to at dawn. 

The snow at night under a half full moon. Brighter at midnight than noon. I remember it silent, but I might have been screaming. I think everything was screaming. Surely this was the peak of something, an edge we tripped over, and, like the snow, we were beginning to fall. 

The girl is building a pair of wings for us. Silly groundling. She’s ripping pages from old books and trying to make feathers. I’m not sure how far they’re meant to take us. I think she means to wear them sledding down the hill and then hang them on my wall. I’ll grow a few pairs myself, by proxy, when the birds nest on the porch in spring. And we’ll watch them hatch and cry and test and learn and leave by summer. And we’ll still be here, a brick house and a body, watching, on the ground.

These wings she’s gluing together on the living room floor, they’re for us. They won’t work. They don’t need to. It’s just us saying to each other we’re brave and silly enough to want what we won’t have. More snow. Stars in our pocket. A way off the ground. 

Please come. Please come. Please. I know you will, 

the apple house