Cold

My feet are cold.

The gentle glide from one season to the next went into some sort of icy skid this week and suddenly the ground is hard and the cold is so intense that the thin snow sounds like styrofoam when you walk on it. And sometimes you can only use three of your available feet because one has frozen up a bit. If that happens to my Person she's in big trouble, being somewhat more limited in the number of feet department.

The river has skinned over with ice, some shark skin looking sections, some sections like glass that mirror the walls of the sandstone gorge, and some sections like ragged doilies wheeling out from the shore. The sections run into each other and under each other, raising ridges and creating icy fissures as the hard surface strains against the flowing water that is just below. The river groans in the cold conflict between motion and stillness, sometimes sounding like a Greek hero brought down in battle, his bronze armor rent. Other times it sounds like an animal beginning to huff and howl and then cut short. Today I thought I was being followed, a wolf perhaps out on the ice, and at every groan I would stare and tremble and then I would bark.

My Person giggled and I decided to go back to hunting for squirrels.

Back home my Person doled out safflower and suet and thistle and peanuts to the cold-fluffed birds who eat from dawn until the yard grows dark. These tiny food-stoked sparks of life battle the night's cold with nary a warm couch or bed to rest on. If they ate as little as I am given they would fall, frozen, from their perches before the sun sank below the horizon. So it is just as well I will spend the evening half-buried in the afghan, under the cheery lamps, the radiator ticking and my Person reading the Iliad beside me while the sounds of the river groaning become the sounds of battles fought and heroes lost so many eons ago.