The trees are sweetly blooming and the chickweed has grown wild in the windy lowlands. California poppies see visitors unwanted.
Children have left their sniffles in the dander of May. They recognize the metallic smell of stale sprinkler water as bright-patterned swimsuits flash across the lawn. Ladies sip their teas and men light their smokes and children wipe melon juice from their dusty lips and pale chins. Oh, the juices, sweet.
The ticky tacky boxes all look the same.
Songbirds jump from yard to yard, harmonizing with children below. They sing songs of untethered anarchy. Sparrows perch beside attractive, white flowers whose smell is especially sick in the summer. Blistering waves ripple from chalked concrete. Golden honey drips down the skyline, sticky like sap. Clouds are thicker and rain feels lighter and midnight breezes cool the air. Pinwheels spin gently, ‘round and ‘round, ‘round and ‘round.
Somehow, I thought the breeze would never stop. Somehow, I thought it would run its delicate fingers through my thick, black hair forever. ‘Round and ‘round the pinwheels turned but soon the breeze would slow.
The children’s voices fade along with the songbirds’ and white flowers blossom for a final time. The undulating ripples of summer heat lay flat and die.
Juices no longer drip from the innocent mouths of suburban children and sprinkler water has suddenly run dry. The freedom of anarchy is suffocated by the firm fists of winter. Ladies and men no longer watch chickweed softly grow or trees sweetly bloom.
As soon as the air begins to cool, I hear empty echoes of louder summers when the air was especially thick and heavy. Soon, those echoes become too loud to ignore. But, she got the urge for going, and so, she went.
I never felt her delicate touch again but I found her in my dreams, the same place I once found wonder. I see her when winter shuts out her honey and her sap.
Winter is a whisper, cold and wet, like frozen hair and sopping linens. Nothing is able to keep me warm, never as warm as those heavy summer days.
Oh, keep me warm before her icy fingers wrap around my hollow lungs and her whisper seeps into my hot and dry.
Hail strikes like broken glass, sharp like fingernails. My skin goes numb and I crave the hellish hot.
Though I thought it would, love did not blossom in the dead of winter. Love did not grow in beds of hardened snow. It chapped, cracked, and crumbled, waiting to be pieced together again. Though, the pieces never fit the way they did during those lazy, hazy, crazy days.
Soon, new snow fell tenderly turning mother-naked silhouettes beautifully haunting and wonderfully ghostly. Fresh powder coated barren fields and the wrong was righted. The unholy was blessed. The gothic, romantic.
Ice melted, snow turned to slush, and the cutting shards of winter wind gave way to the stale embrace of California heat.
Ladies return to their teas, and men, their smokes. Children enjoy the sugary smack of summer and songbirds get their encore. Bermuda grass claws at my smooth ankles and pinwheels spin gently again.
And through the slush, what once was ice, what once was snow, chickweed grows and the trees sweetly bloom again.