Jessica Greenbaum
THE FIRST REALLY COLD DAY
Plugging in the portable heater and pulling it toward my legs I rememberedThe braziers under the round tableIn the Spanish hills. It was January, a searingly cold afternoon, and in a cave-like roomWe sat with the sisters who worked there, the tablecloth pulled over our thighs…And we might all have been knitting together, or divvying provisions;It was a sudden, short-lived society, and in between envisioning all the accidentsBorn from live embers near legs and beneath cloth, I experienced the littleMiracle of it, the conversation—bright and unintelligible to my schoolroom Spanish—You, chatting easily, as engaged as a car in third gear, making your own jokes whileAgreeing enthusiastically, and I could follow the music of it, the lead-up andThe laughter, because I knew the cadences of your conversation like a winding pathThrough the woods—we had wended through many woods in many weathers—And because of all that neither of us knew then—of the illnesses to come, and the realityOf those women’s lives that we had conveniently cropped out at that moment—This could have been a childhood we lived in together for that sheltered hourBefore we walked back into the cold, crossing paths with the owner’s teenage daughterIn her jodhpurs and riding boots, and what we still laugh about was the open packOf licorice she held in one hand, and the fork she used to pierce the pieces with the other.
