Long ago, before we let our bluegrass go to seed, windows were still made of blown glass. Before the plague of aquamarine algae and the murder of the crows, there was a season called Winter — a time of glistening ice and strangely shaped salt crystals.
The lake froze. We drove our trucks across it, chopped a hole and dropped fishing lines. We could light fires. Yes, it’s true — that’s how thick the ice was. Even the stars stuck to the frigid skies.
We huddled together, sang folk songs of formerly colonized prinicipalities, passed a bottle, and belched. Dried cattails rattled in the wind. Every now and then we landed a perch, threw it back.
I wanted to explain this to the children.
I pointed out the goldfish in the aquarium at the dentist’s office. I pulled ice from the freezer to rub on their palms and cheeks. I showed them how to throw frozen tennis balls against the wall; asked them to imagine whizzing across a blueblack meadow with blades on their feet.
I explained that fish weren’t farmed in those days, but swam free-range, eating native grasses and duckweed.
The children said, What’s a meadow?
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Catherine Wald is a poet, teacher and tour guide based in a Manhattan apartment the size of her laptop. Poems have appeared in American Journal of Nursing, Gravel, Minerva Rising, J Journal, The New York Times, and Snapdragon Journal, among others. She has published a chapbook, Distant, burned-out stars (Finishing Line) and a nonfiction book, The Resilient Writer (Persea Books).
