Snow Brooms

Like brooms against snow

shadows of the rabbitbrush

sweep a restless mind. 

Snow fell again on Saturday night. Its planes and hollows are laced with tracks -- birds, coyotes, rabbits, dogs, humans -- like frenetic thoughts crisscrossing the mind. The rabbitbrush blossoms turn dark bronze in the winter, their fine branches spreading like broom straws agains the snow. The sagebrush have turned powdery silver against white. 

Yesterday morning I was lighting the propane stove, when I remembered that we've always had the tank refilled in December. I checked the tank level, and it's down to zero. Why can't I remember this? Meanwhile, we have just ordered a truckload of aspen logs to heat the house for the rest of the winter. We use propane for the stove and for the hot water heater, but those two appliances are responsible for hot showers and coffee -- two of my only remaining addictions. Filling the tank and loading up on firewood can get expensive, but it's still cheaper than heating Eric's turn-of-the-century house in Denver. 

My thoughts are as scattered as the snowtracks. I come home late from the nursing home, and my brain is still numb from the alarms and call lights. I fall into bed and dream of charting I forgot to do. In the morning I have to ask Eric to repeat things that he told me the night before. I worry about forgetting something important. I worry that I've inadvertently harmed someone.

The blue snow shadows calm my mind a little. 

Winter Maze

Walking in a maze

of prickly pear at sunset,

I lose the dirt road. 

Hard Frost

After a hard frost

the last of the tomato vines

freeze into brown bones. 

The frost and snow were late this year. We didn't have our first snow until Sunday; for the first time this season, Blanca is truly white. Our tomato plants have withered to skeletons in the greenhouse. The plants in our sunroom are still eking out a few orange tomatoes, their sweetness concentrated by the cold. We eat the small, candy-like segments on our salads. Their flavor is a ghost of summer.  

This is the time of year when everything shrinks into itself, hardening against the cold. The dirt roads have turned into rutted ribbons. The rabbitbrush and tumbleweeds are stiff hands, raised plaintively against the North wind.