#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

Ice figure, Swamp

“You had to know a person well to make them laugh like that.”

― Cassandra Clare

I dedicate my ice image above to my friend Tonya who called me just before I went out for my walk, even before I was dressed. We have not seen each other since last March, almost a year, as she lives in Tampa, where we met twenty years ago. We have been trying for weeks to catch up with each other. So, I managed to put on my clothes and my boots and my jacket and make my toast and put it in my pocket and go out the door with Charlie while talking to her. I forgot my hat and it was quite cold, but I decided to let it go. I ate my toast crossing the meadow, and I don’t know what the river was like, I wasn’t really looking, I was talking and listening, i was present in this imagined place where we were walking and talking, like a beach, we’ve walked so many of them. My ears, I noticed, were icy, but then I forgot. And I was aware that I wasn’t seeing, really seeing, but I did bend and stop by the side of the swamp and take that shot, I liked it, the blue and the white and the white space where a friendship waits and lasts and keeps happening in the months of silence. There’s always wonder and concern and wishing, and all that is in the white space, it’s counted on, and trusted, friends know it’s there. Well, I kept walking. Just me and Charlie and Tonya. “We’ve been talking two hours,” Tonya said, as I circled the river on the trail back at home now. We’d talked five miles and without my hat. So, now when we see each other soon, we will talk beyond these two hours into many other things. I worked on two poems, short ones, I did not expect to work on today. I think I finished one, and sent it out. The other was one I had left in a jumbled, rough sort of draft. I don’t even know why I opened it. But I found a poem there and I’ll bring it to workshop tomorrow. There is fresh ice on the river for tomorrow.