THAT WINTER
Jeremy Mark Lane
Published by Jeremy Mark Lane at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Jeremy Lane
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THAT WINTER
I’ve often found it interesting the way the weather can affect one’s mood. I speak mainly of myself, as winter has always given me the worst of the blues. The trees, gray, naked, encircled by the crunchy yellow remnants of spring’s beautiful green grass stand sadly below a dreary gray sky. In Texas, where the sun seems to burn hotter and brighter than any place in the world, the chill comes fast and hard. Every year since I was a young child, the first cold snap of winter has created in me a foreboding that increases each day until the sun reappears in late February. There was one winter - that of my twenty-second year - that did not have such an impact. That year, in fact, I barely noticed the cold at all.
It started at the little diner in downtown Bluff Dale. ‘Downtown’ being a loosely used term, of course, as I noticed quickly that Bluff Dale barely had enough town to be down in. There is only a road, nicely paved, from which several unpaved roads snake to the north and south, a deer processing plant that stills stands only by the grace of God, and a small, white house, completely gutted, that now serves as the only eatery around.