Salt, Ice and the Sea

The ice crusted snow is an eggshell over the yard. It will crack and robins will appear. Puffed up robins growing fat from feeding on worms that grew fat feeding on grass clippings and shredded leaves of my last few mowings.  Some growing fat from the eggs that grow inside them. For now, I release rock salt crystals one at a time. I want to see if one will slide all the way to the woods.

Nose close to the driveway, I sniff around looking like my German Pinscher, Auggie tracking moles. I try to determine if the briny water I’ve made from ice and rock salt smells like the beach. I’ve always had a nose for the beach. It can tell if I’m moving closer or away miles from the shore. The water heals me It always has. Cuts, acne, depression all fade when soaked in the breaking waves. I like to imagine I was a sea creature in another life. I’ve never been much of a swimmer so I wasn’t a fish. Maybe a bird. The delicate dance and piping of the plover or the clumsy waddle and piggish grunt of a pelican? Most would say my temperament points at crab. I wouldn’t mind crab. Shore crabs are quick, industrious and even when in large groups go about their business alone.  I can see myself as a fiddler crab menacing anything that comes my way with a claw bigger than my body.

Rock salt is tenacious and finds small dimples or bumps to slow it down. It dies in a tiny ocean it makes from itself and the ice. So I slide pinecones, which go nowhere. I guess their not quite cylindrical shape is to prevent them from rolling too far. I know a pumpkin works and car keys have gotten pretty far in the past. The keys were not on purpose and were very difficult to fetch off of an inch of slippery ice that I had to traverse. Going down and stopping was rough. Coming back up was nearly impossible. Hats off to Tenzing Norgay and Edmond Hillary. Getting up this little hill almost did me in let alone climbing Everest.

            Once the ice was just a little higher than the bottom of the storm door leading to this flat part of the driveway where our cars, snow shovels and salt were. I had to go out the front door and slide down the hill on my butt towards our cars. Hatchet in hand, I looked like a Viking berserker raiding England. I slid into the cars feet first and used the hatchet to free the back door.

The briny water doesn’t bear the scent of the sea. I mix in some mushy leaf bits since I haven’t any sargasso or sea grass and jump in the puddle. Maybe the grinding of the salt into plant and the spread of droplets in the air will bring the ocean here to Beech Road.  That is the ultimate irony of all this. The name of my street is a homophone of the place I love to be. It’s not four hundred miles. It’s just one letter.