Alone

I wanted snow. I needed it, as much as the trees do, as much as rivers and soils do, as mushrooms and flowers, as seeds and the birds that eat them...As the night does. As a poem, the whisper of an icy sunrise, a hoofed snort of awakening. I ache to be alive in the cold, protected by blankets of white. Winter, my love, didn't come to me this year.

I'm homesick here, in my own home. I long for another soul, a shared meal, a conversation started by another voice, the look of another's eyes, a walk together to nowhere in a hurry, an idea not my own, a cup poured for me, a hand. It's not cabin fever. I'm not stir crazy. It's not seasonal affective disorder. I'm just plain old lonesome today. I woke up with a hole in my heart, made of worry, and dreams...

After puttering around the house and getting little accomplished, I went out for a walk this afternoon, in the warm windy grey. An old man of about my father's age approached, walking a dog of similar years, both of them wearing little white beards. The man looked at me as I passed, and offered a kind "hello". The first words spoken to me all day.

The next came from a couple of adolescent girls who stood in the parking lot of a small apartment building. As I passed them, one was squatting, looking at the ground, and talking to someone on the phone, oddly. They seemed somewhat childish, but old enough to mind their own business, and I passed them without making any contact as I turned away to cross the street. It's a quiet part of town, and I assumed that when I heard one of them ask "Are you a soccer mom?" she was talking to someone else. "Hey, are you a soccer mom?". I turned back as I kept walking. The tone wasn't unkind, but the question itself was questionable. No, I said, I'm not a mom at all, sorry...and walked off. 

I wish I'd had a better answer, but my head is in a fog today. Instead of having something smart and friendly to offer in return, I carried on the next leg of my walkabout with a heart just slightly heavier, wondering how a woman old enough to be a soccer mom (and look like one, apparently) could feel put down by a a twelve year old--and pondering why, on a day like this one, these were the words the Universe had to offer to my lonely ears. 

Of all the things I would have liked to hear today, that I cannot say to myself...

"Hey, are you a soccer mom?"  

Nope, I'm not, thankfully, but I do appreciate the fashion advice. 

So it goes...Yesterday was pleasant, serendipitous, even sweet; perhaps tomorrow will be, too. Perhaps.