Letter Home

Letter Home
Dear Family,
It seems the spell I cast upon moving out here has been lifted. This is the coldest winter in two years. Figures. I knew it would catch up with me. I suppose I should be thankful I'm not in North Dakota, or upstate New York for that matter. But I'm not. I have to admit tho', this rural winterness is magnificent. There's little that compares with the rolling hills, once colored in every shade of green Crayola can imagine, now rows and rows of snowy stripped down fields. If you look hard enough, you can still see remnants of cornstalks shivering in the wind. I can't tell if they're desperately trying to peek through to drink in the warmth of the sun or if they're like vigilant soldiers, protecting Mother Earth from the cold.  The night sky is awesome. It is true moonglow that lights this place.  No faraway lights from faraway malls.  The landscape has turned into a patchwork quilt of white and dusty tan, bare trees bundled together look like blurs of smoke in the distance.  Perhaps its evidence of their last breaths, looming between the fields like a tawny frosty fog.  The stars look like snowflakes suspended in descent.  So close you'd swear you could catch one on your tongue.  I want to touch one, and I think about driving from hilltop to hilltop, trying to get as high as I can and as close as I can.  Its times like these when I wish I knew more about the stars. Every constellation looks like a frosted etching against a huge slate black as coal. The night air wraps a chilled, suffocating cloak of midnight velvet around me.  It is silent.  Totally and completely silent.  Silence broken only by a rush of wind from nowhere.  You can hear it making its way, rattling through the iced tendrils of the trees...click, clicket, click, clicket, click.  Of all the wishes on all the stars frozen in this Iowa sky, one would be that you could be here to share this with me.