Cold, Cold, Cold

By Tom Poland

A thirteen-year relationship was dying. Here comes one of those songs that arrives at a hurtful time. The song seemed written for us. You grieve, heal, stumble into new entanglements, regret and vow never again, and before you know it three decades slip by. Life goes on.

But now the radio plays a forgotten song. The words from Annie Lennox’s “Cold” come back. “Now we are shivering. Blue ice is glittering, Cold, cold, cold.” Better times these days are and those wintry words written for frozen hearts long ago revive happier times—childhood in Georgia and a good snow in Carolina.

The snow of 2010. Columbia, SC.

School bus vigils in rural Georgia felt like exile to Antarctica. On those glacial mornings I noticed a phenomenon—rabbit ice known also as rabbit frost, not to be confused with ice flowers. Small columns of dirt would spew from cracks in the earth and flaunt crystals of ice. A cap of frost topped them.

Riding the bus into town I stared at roofs white with frost, as close to snow as I’d come most winters, but when it did, snow turned the land into a winter wonderland. White gold dust might as well have fallen. An altogether new architecture redefined all familiar into soft, glistening curves. A milky species of kudzu had carpeted the land.

The morning after a freshly fallen snow meant a walk through wintry woods. Tracks revealed creatures’ presence. Dad and I tracked a rabbit until we found it melding with brown leaves. Seeing it came as a total shock. Off it ran, kicking up snow.

With boughs crusted white, creaking limbs sporting a meringue of white and the ground softly cloudlike, the woods behind home seemed Vermont-like. As I walked through the trees, my boots crunched and squeaked, a deafening noise in that snowy studio of nature songs.

Then I grew up and wore the winter clothes of a young man with a cheap car and no garage. Come harsh winter nights my windshield glazed over. It was as if needles of spruce had been frosted white and laminated onto glass. Frost coated the glass white-blue-green-white, depending on the light.

“Frost.” The word just sent a shiver through me. Cold, cold, cold.

I recall a good snow in 2010 in Carolina. Eight inches. Older and wiser, no sliding down hills for me. I enjoyed it with a mug of hot chocolate in one hand and later a camera. Fog rose from my mug and feathery plumes of breath shot from me as I framed snowy images. Cold. Birds everywhere. I scattered black oil sunflower seeds on snow. Red birds cracked them open, flinging husks helter-skelter.

Another line from Annie’s song, “Cold.” “Don’t you know that nothing can tear us apart?” Well, it did.

A few years back during the time of masks I bumped into the woman I once knew for 13 years. I came around an endcap at Publix and there she stood. Face to face, we lowered our masks and talked for fifteen minutes … maybe. It seemed like 15 minutes. The years had taken their toll. They always do. She had lost her sister and parents and I had lost my mom and dad.

Our conversation dissolved into small talk. Empty as husks we were. We had become strangers. It felt awkward, this unscripted reunion. Unnerving too. But we were cordial and the wars and heartbreak of the 1990s seemed far away, so far away as Knopfler wrote. She had remarried for another go at that business.

Cordial but cold, Annie. That’s how it was. The fire had long gone out. We stood there, two bursts of rabbit frost popped up from some crack in the earth, then we went our separate ways to melt and return to the earth.

As Dad used to say of all things that died, “That’s all she wrote.”

Photo credit Tom Poland.

Georgia native Tom Poland writes a weekly column about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and culture and speaks frequently to groups in the South. Governor Henry McMaster conferred the Order of the Palmetto upon Tom, South Carolina’s highest civilian honor, stating, “His work is exceptional to the state.” Poland’s work appears in books, magazines, journals, and newspapers throughout the South.

Visit Tom’s website at www.tompoland.net

Email him at [email protected]