Last Winter
The gray sky met the Lower New York Harbor behind a screen of barren trees along the sand dunes. The diffuse light of the sky reflected back on the blanket of snow covering Miller Field, hiding the divoted soccer fields, the sandlot softball fields, and the Canadian goose shit that started plaguing the field sometime after the ‘92 Nor’Easter. The snow had stopped falling five hours ago; unusual for it to be like this in March just a few days before spring. The airplane hangars were the only man-made objects not obscured by the snow.I had trekked into the heart of Miller Field. No one could find me tucked behind my two foot high snow fort, still under construction, and strategically located in such a remote location that no one dared invade, or else be subjected to a Napoleon-esque defeat thanks to a stockpile of over one hundred snow balls which had turned into stones overnight during a brief rain shower. I took a break from building the igloo barracks and laid down upon the snow. I looked into the sjy and listened only to the ocean waved that played the same song over and over again as long as they had a bit of sand and rock to gently crash upon. The sounds of plows occasionally broke through the muffled silence imposed by a good snow storm, lou enough to pry my attention away from meditation and put me back to my solitary work ahead of me.
I always enjoyed being alone. The solitude allowed for me to meditate on a world that I was 12 years into my scholarly observation of, far advanced from my early work of studying how certain shaped objects can be hammered into particularly shaped holes, how block structures fail due to impacts caused by plastic vinyl figures of muscle men in loincloths, and how insect colonies react under duress caused by sudden flooding. The world became more and more fascinating the longer I took to study it. I worked upon an abstracted Earth, where the snow muted the distraction of the human world enough for me to study the smells of a late Staten Island winter, the feel of a twilight snowy air, the sight of a field that quite possibly ran off into infinity from what my eyes could see, the sound of the wind over snow and harbor waves on brown sand and sea glass, and the taste of frost fallen from the sky. These were things that children spent years studying, including myself, but I needed this one last observational study to remember what it was like to be a kid in winter, in snow, because in one more year, I’d be a teen and I’d just stop caring.
A snowball flew over my head. My fort was under attack. I mustered my troops to their stations, and peered over the wall to see the enemy approaching. I crawled against the fort and gathered several artillery shells in my hand and readied to fire.
