November's Icy

Outside, the clouds are banking thickly into a wall. The wind that swept across the country days ago stripped the trees on the mountain outside my window bare, and now they're dark against the sky's white pile, like bristles on a scrubbing brush. One of our aspen trees still clings to a dozen dry yellow leaves; a single bird flies low through a brown forest of brittle cosmos and a black cat picks her way through delicately on white paws down the forlorn path littered with tomatoes never picked.

Merry came in the door steaming yesterday: "The neighbors cut down their pear tree!" she said, her eyes large and angry. "They cut down a living thing." I suddenly realized why their front yard looked so vacant and swept--they'd been talking about cutting their rather gangly, heavily-producing tree down for the past year, but I never really believed they would. A lone yellow pear lies in the gutter in front of their house. Merry and Martin gathered the only fruit that was ever enjoyed from their tree--the neighbors grumpily loaded every pear in black trash bags and dumped them behind their house in a tangle of brush. Now the road lies bare and grey to our right; we can see cars coming for a good half-mile, and the last of our pear-sauce freezes in the downstairs ice-chest. All because of a great lack of imagination on our neighbor's part, because their pears did not taste like the soft, plastic-wrapped fruit in the styrofoam containers at the grocery store.

But here in my little make-shift office, one geranium blossom opens toward the muted sunlight, ten petals, like the swirling skirt of a dancer. I saved the geranium from three days of frost; it will bring me much joy throughout the coming sleet and snow, which, by the by, apparently starts tomorrow. A pear tree lost; a geranium saved. And so October passed and here comes November's icy winds.