abraham linkage

IF THERE IS ONE THING I LOVE it’s the weather this year: how it swings suddenly the wrong way just long enough to confuse the geese, who figure, what with the way the air’s warmed up on a given day, that winter’s over. North they go, and I hear them from where I am. They sing happily, flying in a looser formation than you’d think evolution would allow. They’re headed home.

A FEW DAYS LATER, OF COURSE, the elements remember what they’re about, and the clouds come closer to the earth than they should, and the fog hangs heavy on the ground, and I hear the sound again and look up: here they come again, flying much lower now and calling to one another for fear that one of them will get lost in their hasty retreat southward. It is now the middle of winter.

SOON IT WILL BE COLD ENOUGH to keep them south until the Spring thaw. It will be so cold that we will almost forget them. We will imagine that we have been this cold throughout our entire lives. We haven’t. One fine day they will soar through the skies above our small town again, heading North, and the full sun will be bright behind them. The humid air will stick to us like a death in the family. The geese will sing with a joy that even our dreams will never approach.

WE MAY FREEZE, BUT WE WILL NEVER GO NUMB. In the summer we tend to forget this, and if an unexpected cold front frosts the crops we fear for our lives. We need not worry. The real danger lies, as we should have learned by now, elsewhere. There is a burning that not even a midwestern winter can kill.