Phillip Sterling

Five inches of snow overnight and in the first light a child appears, leading a gray horse on a loose rein gently. The pasture softens at the sight, our heart softens. Whose child is this? Whose horse nickers and sniffs the child’s straw-colored hair? We fashion a kind of stable from the cardboard we pull from recycling. We mix snow and powdered milk as feed. We design lost-and-found posters and tack them liberally to trees and telephone poles here and beyond. Can we keep the child? Has she been ours all along? We plan for hay in the new year and, if we can afford one, a security light, which—like a certain star—will stay lit indeterminately.

The stink bug doesn’t think of itself as odious. It doesn’t question God’s plan. It doesn’t calculate the angle of its trajectory where the ceiling meets the wall. The stink bug could care less for this house and its occupants. In this regard the stink bug is a practitioner of ancient oriental religions.

The mind, Milton contends, is its own place. In this regard the stink bug believes itself to be a rooster, the most handsome and colorful of creatures in the barnyard. It doesn’t think of itself as odiferous. It doesn’t smell danger. It doesn’t think of itself as prey; it has no concept of prayer.

In this regard, envy should not be held against me.

The woods idle in their dying—the elms, the ash, the squatty crippled scotch pine battered by flickers, winded and sapless. One wild cherry is rootless; it leans provisionally on its neighbor, a soft maple, who expects nothing more than to envy the wind, its breath nearly taken. And all without human intervention, without despots or conservancies, torturers or saviors. The woods care nothing for fields of corn, for houses or barns, for pesticides. The woods care nothing for roads. The woods are grateful to have been woods, briefly or remarkably. They idle in their living.

Oh, what wretched joy the world brings!

We are brides for such a short time, giddy and shiverish, the pine barrens so glistened with ice we switch to dark glasses in the car, the world at our passing no less beautiful for it. Then, the first day after, we wake to rain. Rain that muddies the arbor. Rain that sends us skittering to the nearest amusement indoors, where other people’s children have wrecked the carousal and animals that once roamed the winter woods are shedding their white fur. Our guide is unconditional, surly.

Still, we find bustle in the City of Furniture and light from water’s dynamo. A docent at an ancient lathe carves ornaments at our appeal, and the bright shavings at his feet remind us of what it means to be a child, the glad anticipation of so much snow.

The park is closed, its boat launch inaccessible. The timbers of its bridge—pedestrian and gilt with holiday incandescence—is shackled in ice; the river silvers in its stead. Even the best engineers worry; the best climatologists mumble and shake their heads, their thinning hair clogging their wives’ expensive drains. The houses near shore are smart; they’ve gone on the market. There are guesses galore, yet no one knows for sure when it will end. No one knows when to plan the celebration.

And still the dead lie quietly on the hill above town, their rooms well-spaced and dry, their lives intact. The dead have no worry. Let the river spread its silver light like cheerful greetings, the dead say. Let the cows come home. Here’s grazing enough for the time being. Look at how the small islands glitter in the sun.