Desert

My writing class assignment this week is to write a transformation story, so I am writing a short story called Desert about a woman turning into sand. She feels isolated and alone and in the end is very happy to become sand. Happy stuff.

I've had the desert on my mind a great deal lately. As I peek (or should I say torture myself) at the the weather reports from Phoenix, warm and sunny for days on end, I am so amazed at the contrast in my life between this year and last. For the most part, I am okay with the winter weather, but wow, what a winter this is turning out to be.

Boston so buried in snow that it is hard to get around. The streets are narrow, the parking lots crowded with plowed snow. We've been chipping away at the sheets of ice constantly forming over the steps outside of our front door. On one side of our front yard, the snow bank collapsed into the sidewalk so the pile is more than five feet tall, and will now be that way until late March.

It could be isolating - desert like - to be stranded in all of this, but my friends here are a hearty bunch of gals. They throw on snow boots and bring over wine late at night. They drive across town, even in the "wintery mix" (two words I have come to dislike more than the term nor'easter), to have coffee. They know when I am alone and make sure that I am not.

So it turns out that the woman turning to sand is not me. And what I am writing is fiction.