March 2022

March 2023

Spring. Spring. Light in the windows and buds on the branches and spring. The girl is slow to it. She lies in and shivers like the last of the leaves that hung on through winter.

But then she shivers in a new way, we both do, when we feel that warm breath on our neck. Well, on her neck, I feel it run up the chimney, warm weather bringing heat to the passages that some crack in the foundation left cold all winter. What use is it to have a chimney and no fire?

I stretch. I shake her out from under the covers and into the last of the snow. I am lovely, not shy, and I see no reason for her to have eyes if not to look at me. I send her walking away just so she can come back and see me through a break in the trees. Just to feel that cold catch in her throat. Just to have her rushed hands turning bolts and pushing in without shaking the ice off her boots. I send her out to come back to me, to lie breathless on the floor in a too warm coat.

We agree to leave my windows open, and I feel cheeky, winking at the passing neighbors. If that’s not enough the birds are back from their winter sabbatical, and they still sing the songs they must have learned together when they were away. (The birds never remember a souvenir for me.) The girl conjures sound for us as well, and what we sing with the birds can’t be called a duet, but it is undoubtedly music. The relentless thrumming that has us all up late and eager. She leaves my door cracked one day and I coax a bee inside. It’s night before she realizes the buzzing is outside her head, and catches the loud gold thing in a glass to return to the porch.

This is supposed to be a march, but the girl keeps going on about a slow, unburdened crawl. She’s reading from a dusty green-bound book, and you’d think she likes sneezing the way she takes off her glasses to squint at the aging pages with her nose against the words.

She’s talking more, but not to me. She speaks to the sweaters she meant to fold and put away with the cold weather. One she brought up to the bedroom, only to bring him down in pieces. There was some violence between them, I’m sure of it, but no animosity. It was the same sweater she ran to find when the first rain came, trailing hot wind and blankets of cloud. The girl and the sweater wore each other into the storm, so eager she left my windows open for me to watch while she stood in the drive and willed it to rain harder.

For someone who so often forgets her manners around me, I would never expect such a polite request for more. More. More. More please. Rain harder. Blow winds. Crack cheeks. Something, something, hurricanoes. I learned something about my girl then, young and dumb and clueless about the many spiders I’ve snuck into the rafters as she is, she’s seen storms. She’s felt thunder growl through her. She’s blinked against the blinding crack. She is many things, my girl, but she is not a fair weather friend.

She could learn something about me as well, as I am one of these old, unburneded things she is flipping through pages for, but she never asks me. So I settle for being lovely while she flits around me in a tangle, writing notes on every glass surface. I don’t love the illegible mess on the windows, but it’s better than the field of spent yarn she’s sewing in the carpet. No string is safe around her these days. She’s threatened to tie every loose end she finds to hold her thoughts together. Whatever keeps her busy while I charm the cherries from their blossom.

Spring spring spring,

the apple house