It’s still winter & that’s the title of this week’s poem
When I was in junior high and high school, we heated our house with a wood-burning stove. There was also an oil heater that could run, though we kept it turned off as much as possible. And there was a gas heater in the kitchen that functioned as a space heater. This was the late 70s/early 80’s, so remember there was that energy crisis that had hit in the mid-70’s. My parents’ house was in upstate NY on 7 wooded acres. Given we could cut wood and burn it, that looked like free fuel.
The thing is, we were living in an old farmhouse. Old as in no central heating, no central fans to circulate heat through ducts. Basic physics had to be put to work — heat rises. With a fire in the stove, areas on the first floor near the wood stove were warm. Spaces above the stove on the second floor went beyond toasty to something more like sweltering midsummer. And rooms that didn’t get any air circulation to speak of were pretty icy sometimes.
We had ceiling fans to help circulate air (to push the hot air down to mix with the cool air near the floor) but that didn’t help any of the upstairs rooms that weren’t over the woodstove.
On the other hand, ceiling fans were no help in the rooms over the woodstove, notably my parents bedroom, where it was so hot we left the windows open much of the time. Yes, in the snow and wind. It was not that unusual that the white sheer curtains that lined the heavier drapes would get sucked out into the winter winds and freeze that way. This week’s poem refers to the that situation.
Still Winter
The morning alarm:
scrabbling sounds
of mice in the walls.
The wood stove:
relentless. Sheer
white curtains
arch like wings
out the open window,
escape the heat.
An all-white cat
contemplates climbing
from sill to edge
of frozen gauze,
as if by springboard,
trampoline, snowy
escarpment it could
escape the night.
If you enjoyed Still Winter
You’ll find more of my poems on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print.
Missed a poem of the week? Links to prior weeks are on this page.
We are hearing a forecast of zero degrees Fahrenheit as our high a couple of days this coming week. For some places, maybe that sounds normal. Yet, even for northeast Ohio, that’s on the colder side of winter. Not unusual enough to be surprising. But rare enough that strangers shake their heads at each other in the supermarket or at the gas station, as if to say, what were we thinking, coming out in this weather? Stay warm!