We walk thin ice in the fall or spring when there are puddles and the cold makes thin ice and we crunch down on it and enjoy that. There’s thin ice here those times.

There’s thick ice here during the winter. Sometimes it’s so thick the whole lake freezes over, and we like that, and we expect it, and we welcome it every year. It’s a great big lake. The lake’s name is Lake Erie. And we love the big, thick ice. We love how it buckles up and chunks. We love how some things die in that thick ice because they should die, like some of the bacteria. “It’s good for that bacteria to die over the winter,” Smith says. “It shouldn’t grow so much.”

We like how some things are made healthier because of that thick ice. We like taking pictures of that thick ice. We like pretending we are on a polar planet when we visit that thick ice.

That thick ice didn’t happen last year but it will happen this year. It will happen for many years in the future, again and again. We are going to protect this planet, which means learning to love that thick ice.

I don’t like ice in my water inside my temperature-controlled home or a restaurant. I don’t understood why people put ice in the water when it’s cold outside. Or put on the air conditioning when it’s less than 85 degrees outside.

Save for the few days when it reaches the 90s in the height of summer. I do like my rum on the rocks any time though or whatever it is I’m trying like that. Maybe ouzo. Ouzo matches with ice. I like that. I don’t like the hidden ice on the roads or the bridges. I don’t like the radioactive brine sprayed on our roads from oil and gas well waste.

We’re talking about what it is we want now in our poetic expression, and what it is we don’t want. We are not glamorizing distress anymore. We are interlacing what it is we want and we are protecting the ice through thick and through thin.

I love Smith through thick and through thin. Sometimes we’re skating on thin ice and it’s hard. Sometimes we’re skating on thin ice and we’re loose and we grab each other swing each other around and it’s not hard. Sometimes something melts in me and it’s easy and good. Sometimes it’s hot and hard, that ice, and pointy and gaspy. Sometimes my throat hurts. Sometimes his heart skips beats. I don’t want his heart to skip beats. I’d trade the pauses, I’d take them for him. I’m strong. I can do that. The air is strong, too, and it can do that. It can take those missing beats and he will tick and tick and tick. That ice can help insulate it, and when it’s warm–when it’s supposed to be warm–that will insulate his heart too. And if it is not what it is supposed to be then I’ll insulate it. I’ll take those missing beats.

Sometimes I lose him in dreams and then sometimes I find him. He watches movies with me. We’re watching the opening credits, we’re watching the closing credits, we’re watching all the credits. We’re finding the parking spaces, like just now, when Smith found a parking space. “That’s because we’re in the movie,” he tells me.

~ Lady