I remembered the taste of an icicle, out of the blue, I remembered the taste . . . like the smell of cold on the wind . . . I haven’t tasted it; I haven’t smelled it for such a long time. Icicles and cold- cold cold enough to smell, they don’t come to this area often. And if they do, it’s hard to trust a city icicle . . .besides they are never big enough around here. And the smell, it was even so rare in the north. I don’t remember when I last smelled that smell, and I thought I had forgotten.

But it came to me in the middle of the day, in a tall building, under florescent lights. I was washing my hands and I tasted it . . . the very icicle that my brother and I broke of the eves of my grandparents’ house. The one that was nearly as big as I was. The one next to the one that fell when we were jiggling it. It fell and ripped my coat, a parka with a faux fur hood lining. It seems like a dream now.

Oh, I hated the snow and the ice, but I had to go out side for so many reasons. And I liked the creaks and cracks that the new, thin ice made when I walked across it. I liked the squeak of the coldest snow under my boots, and the collection on my soles that gained me up to three inches in the sticky snow. And I would watch the bubbles move under the ice before it was solid. And I liked to walk on the crusted over snow seeing how long I could stay on the surface then hearing the breaking glass sounds when I fell through. And I liked to look at a clean white expanse, and to walk across that expanse, my foot prints alone evidencing that I was the only person who had ever walked that space.

I liked those things, I haven’t thought of them for a long, long time. Or thought of the frost that painted its self across the window pane, and I would wipe it away, and I would lend it my breath, hot on cold, creating new intricate patterns unique and beautiful, and I would scratch them off again with my fingernail so I could see what the new snow again.

November 22, 2003: 78 degrees, Arlington, TX.