split the sky

Last night the wind split the sky. The warm weather of the last few days stripped the field bare of snow.  It spreads out, post to post naked and exposed.  The once tall grass laying face down, trampled and rotting like dead soldiers on a battlefield. 

Around 7 am I walk out with the dogs at my side. I stand in the middle of a mud-soaked field and stare off into the mountains. 

Morning tempered the wind.  It ripples low through the trees and the loose boards of the fence.  It is hard to believe it is almost that time; planting season. I would ignore it but there are already eggs in the incubator. And while we were off somewhere driving the choppy waves of a red dirt road we had agreed that this year March was the time to start seeds in the greenhouse.

March? How did we get here most of the way through February? I don't feel ready to "let go" the cold. To give up the great equalizer that snow is. I want to believe I could forever live a life locked inside a winter but even as I think that I feel the desert ground beneath my feet and I know I am ready to go home. 

Ready to lapse the city. To sit in the dirt and drown in the sun. Run the trails that reach for the edge of the sky. Walk where heaven rests. In the desert, I have no words. In the snow, I have no reason to care.

        If I could split the sky for myself I would ask to hold them both.

“The land is hopeless.  Dry roads bleeding out into a horizon indistinguishable from the dirt they cut.  To say the desert feels apocalyptic would lend a credit that there ever was the threat of life here. It is more comparable to a gas chamber offering only the promise of a slow, suffering death.  I cannot remember a time ever desiring to leave a place so badly in my entire life. ~Abel Manning September 11, 2013 somewhere in Utah”  Life With Man, by mlb