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In the Garden Where We First Met
It’s cold now, but I can still remember the green of it.
Winter — it’s a word we’ve come to fear, the very nature of it something that keeps us locked behind closed doors for the season. Only the ones who wear thermal suits and weatherproof jackets are allowed to go from homestead to homestead to offer relief and sustenance. Once, I was young and sturdy enough to do such work. But for years now the skin sags from my bones as I spend most of my time in front of a fireplace. Strange, really, how our most crude ways of sustaining ourselves have been the go-to keys to our continued survival.
I didn’t have anything left after the storms took away my house down south. From then on, I traversed north, becoming something of a migrant with no roots to call home. I strapped all my worldly possessions to a sled and went onward, hoping to find a place to spend my last years on this dying planet.
I haven’t seen green grass since I was a young thing — but I like to remember.
The paintings you left behind — the things I have saved from every natural disaster I’ve lived through — are the only way I can see nature as it once was, in those glory days when we were foolish enough to think all of it could last forever.
