Just this prompt. Dumb.
Title: Podia
WC: 750
In the early days, it’s all feet. That’s my memory of snow.
My dad’s feet in the rubber overshoes he’d buckle on in the morning before he left out the back way to catch the bus downtown. It would be dark. He would hear us out front, seven, eight, nine neighbor kids hollering on the lawn, up to our thighs in snow heaped up, shovel by shovel. He’d hear us and come up the gangway. He’d plop me and Cassandra—me and one of the littler ones—into the high-sided sled. He’d drop the rope over his head, around his waist and he’d run us down the block. Snow would spray our faces in little waffle pats pressed and sent flying by those black overshoes.
My own feet in plum-colored moon boots, my own feet in sandwich baggies to keep them dry and warm. That’s my memory of snow, too. My mother grumbling about being poor and stuffing hand-me-down boots with newspaper so they’d fit. I’d trudge in those moon boots behind them sometimes, my parents as they glided along a trail in cross country skis. My gaze would travel, fascinated, along the narrow tracks, the snow packed tight enough to seem like a mirror. For long stretches of time, I’d forget my feet were wet, my toes were freezing in their sandwich baggies.
It’s latter days now, and still, it’s feet. That’s still my memory of snow.
The Hound loved the snow. In the yard he’d race through drifts, his long body jackknifing so a sliver of horizon would appear, disappear, appear disappear. The salt would hurt his feet, though. Or the cold pavement, I never knew which. We’d be blocks and blocks from home and the hopping would commence—a back leg held high as he tried to maintain the pace. Or, less often, a front paw lifted, dangled at an accusatory angle. In truly desperate times, he’d collapse on his side into a drift, looking up at me with plaintive eyes, as though I could carry all 75 pounds and 6 million linear inches of him, even if I’d wanted to.
But I’d kneel down and clear the packed snow from in between the black, fleshy pads. I’d call him a goofus, a chuckle hound, and point out that if he’d walk through the ribbon of snow at the edge of the sidewalk, rather than over the heaping mounds of salt, it would probably hurt less. He’d scramble to his feet, and he’d be off again, taking us farther and farther still from home, because he loved the snow, even the last winter he was alive, he’d take us on winding 4-mile walks through it. He’d unexpectedly want to run, though his typical pace by then aspired to a shuffle.
There’s a new hound now. Lowercase h for size, not for attitude, not for lack of love of snow. She dives on her stubby legs straight into the piles at the edge of each lawn. She loves, best of all, to be up to her chest in it. She sticks her nose deep, deep, deep into the powder and huffs. So did the Hound. It’s H/hound thing, clearly.
She doesn’t seem to feel the cold. When the single digits claim the tips of my fingers the second we leave the house for our night-time walk, she still has infinite time to sniff, infinite curiosity about alleys, infinite mandatory investigations to make of mile-high drifts climbing fences, climbing tree trunks. The undulating paths we take across the big field at the park map the scent of two feet, four feet, two feet, four feet. If there’s a squirrel skittering along a fence, along a wire overhead, there is no snow, there is no human on a tether holding her back. The forces of physics cease to exist and she flies, her belly just skimming the raised bed between tire tracks.
I keep thinking of getting her boots, but she doesn’t hop as much, just every once in a while. The salt doesn’t seem to get to her, or maybe her constant freestyle swims through the snowbanks keep things in check. She does plant her feet if she wants to go this way and I’m insisting we go that.
But she comes along, more or less. She resists. I insist. Mostly, she runs ahead and I follow the trail, the impressions her round, stubborn little feet leave pressed into the snow.
MTZQ Telecommuniculturates 