A hearty voice booms out a cheery greeting to someone I can’t see…a conversation continues down the hallway and fades. I can’t know the outcome because I am in the other room. Who spoke? Are there plans for lunch?

January meals; we charge against the wall of grey cold armed with only a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich on rye, crisped in curried butter; a bowl of cold, snappy sharp vinegary coleslaw and a mug of black coffee with fresh cream, boiled strong. This is a gut cleansing lunch meted out in bits and bursts and bayonets; heated with friendship and talk of the storm, politics and the playoffs.

From the other empty room where I remain alone, I imagine the battlefield…caffeinated steam rising up beyond the window and over the dirty edge of the Genesee river…as we ready ourselves for the final week of January.

This is how I remember feeling most of the time in high school during the winters…an odd combination of terror and invigoration…wanting to remain forever under thick blankets while standing late at night outside when the snow actually crackled and split with cold.

Watching blue snow that glittered brightly under the moon…eating scalding hot french fries with spicy mustard as I walked home…not being able to feel my finger tips while my tongue burned…under a watching white winter orb.

On this humid August day, the earth on a whim, draws her bath and the steam rises to the tops of buildings.

The tub is full as meadows flood and the leaves await a new season’s future.

The air is grey cotton.

The lush, black Turkish towels are trees bending strong and wet amid the flash of the earth’s mawkish and toothy grin…

Notes on gravity and all things science…or not. When at the end of an arduous day, there is a bench in the hotel foyer which looks as if it is meant to be sat on…and under the end corner, where the padded section of the bench lies, there is actually only air…and one is quite tired, spent really…and one sits down on padded air…suddenly! Wham!

Hitting the floor with panache…

The owner or manager comes running speedily around the corner. The desk clerk comes running from behind the counter. A guest with a large and curious dog comes running from the breakfast room. A couple entering the hotel at that very moment note that I am seated on the floor waiting to greet them.

The owner helps me up. The desk clerk, guest with large and curious dog and the newly greeted additional guests disappear fairly swiftly and quietly.

I’m fine. I’m fine. Now, I am going swimming…

Our Blue Moon is exhausted from exertion; shining brilliantly last night over darkened trees, sleeping houses and cooling land. She settles slowly way off somewhere behind the forest on a quiet Thursday dawn as she winks and nods a greeting to the new month. Morning yawns cautiously in reply. The moon and the dawn find themselves together on the down side of nothing.

This nothing day is not a day without purpose, but a time where the mind’s eye, rested and cleansed looks outward; far, far ahead to see the horizon uncluttered with tightly drawn squares, check marks, detailed lines of faces all demanding that something happen. On August the first, the day after the Blue Moon, nothing must happen. There is brewing coffee and porch lingering to enjoy while listening to energized neighbors discuss methods of pulling rocks out of the front and side yard; a few vicious sneezes, and then silence.

Wherever those people linger who demand that we ‘do’, may hover elsewhere for just a bit longer because our summer is not yet spent. The season turns just a touch more with that inevitable twisting down toward cooling ground, longer evenings and lengthening shadows.

In June we tossed aside notebooks, envisioning endless sand, puffy clouds, watermelon ice and corn dogs; this time it would last forever. But July always comes to an end. So soon, too soon Earth’s yellow orb cowers under the Blue Moon’s gaze and she blinks first and so soon must we. But not today. Not yet.

August’s first early dawn settles, just a touch reserved; waiting as the white curtains in the reading room billow and flap wildly, and over this rocky terrain we call home, wind chimes blow continually at the edge of this house on the hill. He labors with the land by 6:30 morning time; weeding and seeding and by mid day I shall take him cold, iced lemon water because all seasons require kindness.

On solving challenges…Elieser races out of the trench of indecision with machine gun energy…rat a tat tat! Boom!

I remain underground, rolling bandages and adjusting my Red Cross apron and counting laces and boots, hoping it will all go away. There is no mustard gas, fortunately.

The battlefield clears and we wind up at our own version of the Treaty of Versailles…minus any economic fallout. There will be no Third Reich.

Time for dinner…

Now an official owner of an Iphone…an early anniversary gift from my Elieser.

I have been dragged into the world of technology with a rotary phone and a land line in one hand and a book of poetry in the other…sail on.

She kept reading and reading. It was the most sacred of escapes; an unquenchable stream of truth and beauty and human struggle to bring things back into balance.

She turned pages and knew once again; there was nothing new in the human experience. Every emotion she felt had been at one time felt by someone else in different rooms under different skies.

She calmed down, gathered her thoughts, lifted up the rich burden of life, and hoisting it full bellied onto her shoulders… determined to go on…

A monarchy is easier. High treason, I understand. Those who sailed, swam, ran or limped toward the new world; away from the past to the shining shores, shudder at any wishful mention of ‘the crown’.

I’m looking for Tocqueville’s America. Instead we are trapped in John Sloan’s painting ‘Election Night’; the rabble on the streets, the brawling and the noise, the rambling and loud debates. The bar is lower than it ever has been and I would love to sit on a cushion and shake my finger and drink my tea.

A monarchy is easier; certainly more elegant and would be preferable…for a day or two.

To the child I did not know:

You lived and skipped, danced and smiled…hoped and prayed…learned and planned…walking along the white hallways of your side of the building.

And yet our paths did not cross…

The building was too large, the hallways too wide…the days too short…so many children, so many over extended minutes of your planned day, my little man. I walked in your hallway, always en route to something else…purposed toward those other activities; the filing of papers, the planning of lessons, propping up the system…knowing, always knowing that I needed to stop.

So I missed you…

I missed knowing you…

I had to search for a photograph this morning as I grieved. I needed your face to match the sorrow.

I visited the site of your death this afternoon. Your teacher wanted to place flowers at your place of demise…the place where your spirit began an early ascent…back to the God who granted you life…and so we walked there together. Your teacher wept and placed flowers and stood there, stunned with the finality.

After you kicked the recess ball with all the strength and enthusiasm possible in the body of such a tender young boy…kicked with all your might and joy…the ball soared upward and upward as you ran and ran with that little smile. Pure physical energy and sunny spring happiness…and you ran directly into your passing…swooped up by the angels.

They assembled early; sent ahead of time, invisible in the bright sun…snatching you up at the edge of that deadly blacktop, by that smashed fence. You were not left alone…by the grace of God, but caught up in the arms of the beings sent in advance to carry you, carrying you home in the sunny shade of the early afternoon.

Such a homerun for you, little one. You kicked that ball…right into the arms of God.

Missed and mourned, your side of the building is bereft, wounded, shocked…but you are most blessed, my little man…you are blest indeed.