Dan Berick

the snowing winter wild

Let that snow keep coming down, I don’t mind. Let it pile up, let it cover up another short dark day. Cover the street and the sidewalks. Let’s see it drift over the four short steps up to the front door, until you can’t even tell what’s under there. Until there’s not even a boot-print to betray them, just that perfect unbroken glittering white blanket.

It can snow all week, I don’t care, as long as the power stays on. There’s plenty of food for Margaret and me. I can watch the snow drift up over those steps, and see how it balances itself, impossibly, on the branches and power lines outside my windows, flake upon flake upon flake. There’s plenty to eat, plenty to look at, just let the power stay on. There’s nothing else that Margaret and I need.

Margaret’s not interested in the snow. All she wants to do is make sure she walks in front of me every time I use this thing. Just steps right over the damn keyboard. Looking over her shoulder at me and smirking.

Margaret wasn’t my idea. ‘We got you a cat, Dad. We didn’t like thinking about you being all alone in the house.’ Just when I’d gotten the last of Ellen’s things cleared out, too. They gave me a cat to replace their mom, after she finally gave up the fight. It seemed funny to me when I pointed that out to them, but they didn’t think so. So now I have Mrs. Thatcher flouncing around the house, sneaking up on me and sticking her butt in my face.

Mrs. Thatcher and I aren’t going to watch any of the new shows the kids tell me about. Or listen to any of the podcasts, no matter how many links they send me. Let them throw up their hands and roll their eyes. ‘You know how Dad is.’

But they don’t know how I am. They just know how ‘Dad’ is. Like the gang at the office, they only knew ‘Bill’.

So from here on out, I’m only watching something if I already know how it ends. Give me a twelve-part World War II retrospective on the History Channel, something like that. I don’t want have to wonder what the ending is. I’ve already got one ending I’m wondering about. That’s plenty.

And let that snow keep falling.

Dan Berick is a writer based in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, whose fiction and poetry explore love and loss and loneliness and their unexamined reflections in the quotidian lives of the quiet people around us all.  Dan is also a lawyer, a husband, a father, and a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Chicago.

Dan wrote the following about ‘The Snowing Winter Wild’:

Last winter I was looking out of my window at the snow covering the steps to my house and thinking about how it never gets easier to try to really know another person. And although I’ve never lived with a cat, and am vaguely afraid of them, the cat named Margaret Thatcher seemed to insist on being a part of this story.