A COVENANT NO MORE

A COVENANT NO MORE…….

In the darkness sitting, both hands resting on the wide arms of my newly purchased easy chair covered in what felt like silken burlap. A welcomed site, I watched a tear in my eyes, through bright floor to ceiling windows illuminating the darkness of the room, crystalized powder swirling into clouds of white. Winters dust blossoming as the snow plows blast past main street, headlamps reminiscent of river barges pushing through the dark mud waters of the south, colossal blades cutting mounds of ice as a hot knife might through butter, massive diesels traveling far faster than the drift covered limits posted on the speed zones outside my Colorado loft in this small town of Ridgway.

Sadness fills every fiber of my soul weighing on my heart as a thousand stones beneath the waters of edens spring. Christmas eve 2009, cold, 5 below I believe. No music, just silence and the sound of a Christmas wind howling through the streets, blowing snow from one of my window sills of which three walls cover into the abandoned alley a story below.

 Sitting, thinking, trying to forget and praying that none of this had ever happened and that I was with my family now taken it seems, so long ago.

Chinese tonight, not very hungry on the 24^th day but not alone either, thinking about the five minutes I was given with my children in temperatures below zero because she didn’t want me in the house where he was, probably watching, from one of the three floors of windows in this apartment I paid for month upon month and which he now claimed as his domain.

My children, bright eyes all three and sad smiles on their faces run down the sidewalk to a waiting hug, the excitement of this eve still awake in their memories, not certain what had happened over the past year. And each a kiss with a high dad welcome, then a quick merry Christmas and a final squeeze around my neck before running back up the snow covered sidewalk and vanishing into that house with gifts, away from the sadness, away from my heart, away from the frozen night, away from the thoughts of divorce.