Winter has not fled northeastern Queens. As the widget on my computer screen informed me that it was in the low 30s, I dug out my tuque and gloves for my morning walk with Titus. My work schedule has been hectic lately, so I wanted to give Titus a longer walk than he's had of late.
We were on the first leg, one that curves past the back of a two-armed strip mall that embraces a parking lot never quite full of cars and continues on into a tract of houses, when I spotted a stump in the strip of yard between sidewalk and road. In one of the deep grooves of bark was a finger of ice. The stump was freshly cut, yet I couldn't remember the tree. I can never seem to remember the tree, except for one on the curb a few streets over, whose trunk was coiled by thick, woody vines. The tree tipped forward, its branches shaded the crest of the hill. One night it was felled by one of what seemed like a hundred lightning strikes and formed a blockade on the street for several days.
The ice did not surprise me. I walk on the shaded north-facing side of the street, where snow, ice, even dew, lasts longer than on the sunnier south-facing side.
I studied it because it looked unphotographable and perhaps even undrawable and demanded a return to an older technology: firsthand observation, the senses (limited as they are), and words that were permitted to assemble themselves and be assembled into sentences and paragraphs, with all the punctuation and carefulness that freeze ideas for future thaw. Suddenly I am reminded of why I enjoy these walks with Titus: the self that usually shadows my other self, the one that emails, texts, phones, web-chats, is finally given something to do.
The finger of ice was crooked, following the jagged curve of the bark, and its tip was melting, drop by drop, into the tufts of grass below.
I looked at it. Titus, my avatar, licked it.
