Introducing Janie...

Janie hasn’t ever particularly liked snow. She pretended to, once, walking home from a college party. As the square-faced boy squeezed her bone hard against his chest she stuck out her tongue to catch a flake.  She thought he’d think she was sweet or cute in the off-handed unlikely way Jersey girls tend to be. Playful. But the flake tasted like metal, as if a free-floating skinny-ass beer cap had landed on her tongue instead of ice, and she wanted to spit. But she didn’t. She swallowed it. Which was, over the course of their long drawn-out relationship, one of her more consistent errors.

And today, April 18, it’s snowing again, which Janie finds offensive. She rallies some times in the dead of winter and gets the children outside in sleds or on skis in the woods out back, because that’s what a mother is supposed to do - to galvanize children to the great out-doors. And once in a while, she’s admitted to magic out there in the snow. Mostly because it’s brighter than mud, but also because things that ought not sparkle do, in the snow, and there’s no evolutionary reason for precipitation to be dazzling.

In April, however, snow isn’t dazzling. It’s usually mixed up with some other foul earth-bound matter - like rain or sleet or cole slaw falling in chunks out of the sky. It makes Janie think god is maybe in perpetual rotation and April catches him in his middle school years, misbehaving and pissing people off without a big plan of what’s going to happen next. By late May, it’s back to diligence and growing stuff and being all optimistic mid-twenties-style. By August, god is 40 and tired all over again.

Janie doesn’t think about the square-faced boy very often and when she does, it’s typically with relief. He is the unchosen path. That makes her feel clever, even when her chosen path gives no sign of ever having been groomed and she is good and ready to do some clear-cutting. Even when it’s snowing, and it’s April, and she’s not entirely sure there’s anybody in charge.