Winter

You have to know how to love winter. Much like you have to know how to love summer, but few people think about that. Precautions like sunscreen, light clothes, and afternoons at the beach or the pool seem to come naturally. But winter seems almost universally loathed.
You have to learn how to love the cold, or at least how to bear it, as one bears the 100 degree temperatures of summer. A fireplace, a heater, a heavy blanket--if you think about it, we have more protections from cold than from heat. A good coat, gloves, hat, ear-muffs. Thermal underwear. Hot cocoa. You can grow to love these things. Then, fully equipped, to love walking out in the frozen air and even find it healing.
What is not to love about a blue-sky day with the late-rising sun creating a brighter-than-usual morning thanks to the whiteness of the world and the thinness of the air? White mountains, white fields, white houses, white trees. Sparkling, crisp air. Watch your own breath rise from your mouth and marvel at your own internal locomotive, that coal-burning fire within.
You can learn to love the winter, love the cold, and embrace the early dark. To open your eyes on a frosted morning with joy and peace that no other season provides.
Winter is quiet. Winter is lucid. Winter is peace.

Toy airplanes

They float, drifting through any color sky, from pale morning blue to December afternoon gray. They are noiseless, at least through my windshield. Through the windows at the office I can sometimes hear a low, unobtrusive rumbling reaching me from what seems like the wrong direction. Something about the way they move, like bubbles, or like puffs from a dandelion, compels me to watch. I can't look away as the tiny shape crawls across the blank sky and eventually vanishes behind a mountain, or beyond the frame of my window.
It was evening a week ago that I saw one lifting from an air field some miles ahead of me. It climbed silently up over the lake whose surface threw a reflection of the sky, of the hills beyond. They are supposed to be fast, but they always seem so slow looking from the ground with a craned neck, eyes squinting, flattened hand standing up on my brows. The color of bone, or of tooth, they seem to hang impossibly long in space.

We own the Bison

I wonder if they know they are publicly-owned, those American
Bison roaming and grazing this hump of earth stranded
in a lake of salt.

"Don't grow sentimental over the seven," the director spat,
"The animals are worthless - there isn't worse meat
on earth to eat."

Enormous, shaggy, drifting nomads hoisting heads big
as car tires; dark glossy eyes peering below curls. Why
would we eat them?