On Lifeguards

One gift of winter, though there are many -- for example, the icicle that snapped three stories to the bricks beside the entrance of the art store where two folks, laughing, said, “We better watch where we walk,” and, in my passing, I added, “Right!”

The three of us teammates for whom death is, still, a spectator sport; us sitting on the bench, waiting for someone’s future newborn to sub-out from the game (The Purgatorial Ether), slap our hand, and tell us Coach (Death) needs us to get warm, it’s nearly our time. For what is life but a bench between nothing, on which we point and gawk at all we don’t know (the Game, the Purgatorial Ether, Coach).

The gift I’m thinking of, in the 33 degree, sunny weather, is the way that winter might mask joy. So that when the tendrils of joy and springtime creep through the eyes and nose and mouth holes of the seasonal, porcelain mask, on days like today, the very foundation of frost and rock salt shakes. What I mean is that winter makes me forget the summer, and, in remembering or glimpsing the summer, the joy of its coming abounds.

Like lips drenched in nectarine juice. Or laying on stones in the sunlight drying. Barefoot getting the mail and opening my window and swimming in rivers, instead of the chlorine of the pool, which offers its own sort of gift, a lingering, chemical scent that reminds me that the past did, in fact, happen. And I was in a pool as it did.

Stretching my arm through the water.

Goggles leaking.

Breath in lungs with lifeguards watching.