Complaint

        “Will you miss the snow?”

She puts down the paper and looks up. He is standing at the window, looking out. It’s snowing steadily, the big visible flakes of an gentle snowfall, but she knows without getting up to look, that the ground is already covered and, if there are cars on the street, they are moving slowly.

“What do you mean, ‘miss the snow?’” she says. “It’s snowing now.”

“As the planet warms,” he says, still at the window, not looking at her, chewing the stub of his unlit pipe, something she knows he does miss.

“In our lifetime?” she says. “I don’t think so.”

“But if we project ahead . . . “

She pauses. Thinks. Where is this conversation going, this snow conversation? She loves winter, snow, cold weather, icicles, what he calls—has called—the whole tragedy, the tragic season, the season of discontent—his—and disagreement—theirs. “Will you miss it?” she says.

He takes the pipe out of his mouth. “Well, yes,” he says. “What would I have to complain about?”

“How I squeeze the toothpaste?”

“Cat vomit?”

“Unmatched socks?”

“Lost scissors?”
“You late to everything?”

“You too early?”

“Unmade bed?”
“Snoring?”
They stop, both of them now standing at the window, holding hands and watching the soft curtain of snow blanket their yard in white, coat their sidewalk in beauty, cover their driveway in wonder. . . that, inevitably, will need to be shoveled.

©2014 Kathleen Coskran