A Cold Weekend

Snowblower diesel mingles with sweat and the scrape of shovels.

Brakes squeak and whine as cars send their owners on a thrill ride, often fatal. I don’t know about cars, but I know mine doesn’t like the ice-muck. Slush is best for drinking in a paper cup, not driving in. I wonder if this weekend would have turned out differently if the snowdrifts were cola-flavored. I should have gotten the hint. The snow omen. The snomen. The snow-man. But this was not about a man. For once. It was a weekend of storm clouds, lost traction, and an envelope with miniscule printed letters. A weekend of narrowed eyes, of backward glances. A cold weekend. I looked at my mom rolling around in the snow. She hadn’t brought it up since the blue hours of yesterday morning. I thought of how a decade of affection had been swept aside as easily as dirty snow by a street plow. That was all those moments were to me now: obstacles to be moved, soon to disappear in the afternoon heat. The manmade piles of white were knee-deep and not cola-flavored. They tasted like water that had been in an old shoe for too long. The weather was frigid but that’s not what froze me. It was a cold weekend.