Letter To Our Friends

Letter To Our Friends

- Fleda Brown

Dear Delaware Friends,

You thought we wouldn’t last. It’s been nine years, now, since our first winter in Traverse City. The old house we bought was freezing upstairs. Poor ductwork. Well, this is the North, we said to ourselves, pleased to have joined the ranks of long-underwear wearers. Delaware, well, you know—two or three blasts of snow, a foot or so, heavy on the trees until they give one shake and shed it like a dog coming out of the water. I used to hold my breath and hope, please make it last a week before it turns brown and puddly.

When you grow up in Tennessee and Arkansas, as Jerry and I did, snow is a miracle. You don’t shed those feelings. When the icicle on the eaves of the first house we bought in Traverse City grew to the size of a large man, we thought it was glorious. We took pictures. Ice dams? A new term to us. A writer friend from North Carolina complained about a draft of one of my poems: “Icicles don’t list. They go straight down.” Oh yes, here they do, I wrote back, looking out my window at the one the wind had crafted at a 45-degree angle.