the cold

She thought she missed the snow, but what she’d really been missing was the cold. The cold seemed to clear everything, to sweep away all the “stuff” that hung around and grew in the heat and the dampness. When the front swept through in the early morning, the early daylight hours, she felt a lightness she’d been missing. Nothing she could quantify, just something that made everything seem a bit less complicated. She slept better, at night, too, knowing that the darkest hours would be the coldest, the most brittle and brutal and that as the sun warmed things, life would become a bit more manageable, that she could hide beneath the covers during the night, but emerge to a kinder morning. She was sure she was just making it all up, rationalizing it, how things changed for her, depending on the weather, but it made her feel better, nonetheless, and that was all that mattered.