Will it be this happy and effortless when the cold draws near. We’ll doubtless find beneath auburn foliage little nonpareils of summer’s joy – all we’ve experienced these months, distilled and pipetted into tear drop gemstones, no larger than freckles of sand. We’ve walked distances I’ve not dreamt of before, not all at once, not with a partner. Wet ground and pine litter will welcome us forward into nibbling air and supple evening moodswings. The fall will be fine, the sun ambient and sworn against departing until half asleep and obviously flushed.

More for the winter, I worry. Rain that strikes back small inchworm optimism that dreams of evening patio, evening perch, and halved tall boys dispensed between wineglasses. Trading those summer fruits for the stores of old hurt sitting dusty in the cellar, cobwebs cable-thick with last winter’s sediment. Among the rations: the bleak inevitable state of me as I repair my anemia with unjoyful, unlovable somnolence, resting my eyes beneath a crushed velvet blanket of 4PM ultramarine until restless ringing bursts my viscera and I rise to mime autonomy under electric lights. May as well be the kind of analog clock that gets forgotten each daylight savings, adjusted in retrospect by sunlight running back to scoop up that single hour left behind. Should be planted in April soils but plucked rapaciously before the frost. Barren and wasted in the cold months.

You say we’ll pull out the dutch ovens, the felt blankets; trade beers for bourbon when it’s time. You see the hallways in our house cast over in vignette but right dead centre our mirth will throw light, because our goodness we can soak in kerosene and ignite against the winter’s hunger. Do you say this just to mollify the edges of my threnody, or will you trudge out in the mud to prove that within the basins of your bootprints grows something green and hardy and patient. Will you open the door to pluck vestal snow with your bare hand, calling me over to watch it die by the heat of you. Can you do this winter and winter over, and would you want to, and would the dutiful trips into the cold not seize you at the lungs, at your cheeks lush with capillaries. How much more likely to look out our aerosol window and see the frost sweeping over your jacket’s shoulders and your legs moving forward no more in a final refusal to abide my requests, my shapeshifting sense of safety, while from the pocket of displaced chill air the empty space of me laments further, and forgets warm nights, forgets ease.

I grew up on the foothills, knowing winter as the patricidal successor of all before. Even if romanced by whiteouts and sweet silence under skies haunted by rictus snow, I’ve learned well the merciless ways of the season. Pleasures must be stoked with forethought and fortitude must be sewn into your mitts, your scarves. Seek daylight when in its mercurial benevolence it strikes ground. Sequester vulnerable flesh beneath layers. To idle in the elements means death on your knees, but so too to pine for the lost summer that hears not any mortal calls. To find your hearth I’ll have to stray from my sad-soaked bed and through steam on the river I’ll spy you. The fear is you’ll hear nothing but wind at your door, see nothing but swallowed light staring back.