Still Cold.

Frost on the lawn every morning now, that green-gray brittleness all jeweled over and the dog crunching her way around out there on it, looking for a good spot to pee. Reminds me of being a kid, of otherness, of some gauzed memory from some other time altogether, some time when we used to dip below freezing, even in Atlanta, all the time. A time when the local anchors would ask you to bundle up your kids to wait for the bus, and mean it. Nowadays it seems like if you lose your gloves it's no big deal. Back then it seemed to matter. Quite. Today feels like those mornings did, and if not the bus then it would have been a frozen ride to school in my father's 1963 VW bug, ragtop closed down but leaking plenty of cold highway air anyway. If I work on it I can remember what my jacket looked like. If I work on it I can conjure up a stocking cap, a sweater added on at the last minute, a pair of gloves ruined in the previous winter's snowfall. This is, of course, all from back when it used to snow. Maybe we're on the verge of having that sort of winter. The last buyers, the fuckers who fell through on us, wanted to know about our heating bills. Maybe we should tell the next ones that we don't really know, that it hasn't been winter since we lived here, that we have no idea what Duke Power might be getting ready to send us this month, that we don't really know any more what it means when it gets cold. All we know is that we think we've seen this before, think we remember a little bit about what this used to feel like, maybe.

It's cold. Not bitter, arctic cold, but cold all the same. The forecast has us staying that way a while longer. Be ready out there at the bus stop, friends and fans of weather, of gloves, of hats and scarves and all other wintertime accessories. Be prepared, the scoutmaster would tell us. We are prepared! we'd shout back, even when we knew we weren't.