a different kind of warmth

Another winter tightens its skeleton-tree grip around my landscape. The air is painful to breathe. The rare siren-song of brief daylight is little more than an icy false promise. I begin measuring time in belt notches rather than ticks on a Timex. I begin replacing the missing sun with whiskey. Radiant fire in expanding belly. A different kind of warmth. Walking snowy woods I think of summer warmth, of salted peanuts at a Denver Zephyrs minor-league baseball game at Mile High Stadium on a dusty Tuesday in July near the end of the Cold War. I think of parking lot carnivals and the vast expanse of day stretched like a lazy hammock between early dew on green grass and cacophonous fireworks launched from midnight driveways. I think of jackknives and slingshots and standing knee-deep in lake water, cane pole in hand, bare feet slipping into the decaying muck of the lake bottom, and later trying to remember something from high school biology class about lake bottoms while staring into the fire at midnight. I think of making birdhouses and sawdust with Grandpa and the time he taught me how to spin a stick in a drill against sandpaper to make the perfect birdhouse perch. Right now, summer warmth is still a memory hidden on the other side of this winter. I'm thinking about depleted energy reflected in the notches of my belt. One notch out indicates one too many winter drams and nothing says winter like bourbon guilt. It's an annual dance, wondering if I drink too much. Grandpa died last October. We spent an evening unpacking his closets and his house and his life. We unpacked snowshoes and horseshoes and marbles and fishing poles and pheasant rifles and bills of lading and the badger hair shaving brush that stood guard in his medicine cabinet for decades. A symphony of warm memories, but hidden within any symphony are always a few unpleasant notes. We learned that just before he went to the nursing home, Grandpa wasn't doing much of anything except drinking vodka by the half gallon and upsetting Grandma. I wonder if we're the type of drunks where it's only dangerous when there is nothing left to do. Right now I have lots to do. I have to move Grandpa's funeral card. It's been marking the pages of a book of surreal Japanese fiction, but I think he'd feel more at home inside E.B. White. Rural brothers of the mother earth. He'll be warmer there until summer comes again. Summer always comes again. The days get a little longer; the belt closes a little tighter.

Freelance writer and filmmaker Joseph Johnston made his first movie at the age of 11, an industrial espionage thriller that continues to play to excited crowds in his parent’s living room every Christmas. His work has appeared in Rawboned, GTK Creative Journal, Old Northwest Review, and the Linden Avenue Literary Journal and his movie Fragments was the inaugural winner of the Iron Horse Literary Review's Video Literature contest. You can keep up with him at http://www.joe-johnston.com

For more work by Joe Johnston, visit his page at our Online Sundries site.