For Beverly
Winter’s White is a blessing medicine: Rainbows drawn in as breath, breathed out as sugar frosting on a tumbled crust. Every crystal blinking pure light in spaces unseen, like silver beads knotted into a string bag and glittering on some sky Dakini’s arm as she strolls the marketplaces of the Milky Way, hips asway.
Do you remember making angels in the first snow? When our pastel arms sweeping the snow into wings also brushed stiff green hairs into spiky feathers; when the earth would yield beneath us and the vault of heaven was a soul magnet that poured joyous laughter from our bodies with the steady irresistible pull of cork from bottle? We were four and three: towheads, you shy, me bolder; neither of us yet pulled out of true.
Alone with the sky and free of mother-pain, in our snowsuits we were clumsy pink church mice moving ‘cross our tiny yard as it it were the vast white arctic. We trekked recalling a hundred words for snow, unsurprised to see reindeers in flight, safely skirting a polar bear and her cub. In the space between the houses, beneath the old dogwood, we pushed snow with mittened paws and casually accepted the miracle of shelter when it became a shapely igloo.
We were basic then, solidly together, manifesting whatever we desired when left to our own devices. Always too soon, the call sounded across the dimensions; the perfect igloo dissolved and cold blossomed, biting our cheeks and fingers as we trudged home, hoping for cocoa and toast; hoping that Daddy had arrived and the warm kitchen was again a haven.
Laurie's Treehouse 