I felt it in the warm breeze over snow still on the ground. I was in the back yard just after dark, and it took me back to high school, to the way it felt to run through my hometown of St. Marys, from one end to the other after a date, from her house to mine with no time to spare to beat my curfew. It would be April, and somehow the mix of warm and cold in the air piping in and out of my mouth and lungs, and its promise of spring on the other side of one more cold snap, was just this side of maddening. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Emerson, Eliot, and under all their words coursed the poor dumb animal blood that rushes harder when spring is still a promise and not yet a day. I wanted to break free, not just of winter, but of flesh and bone, of small towns and youth, of wasted time and unused energy. The destination was then unnamable, a vague dream as demanding as teenage flesh. I ached for a place I knew was there, a place of which I had no more concrete knowledge than I did of mortgage payments or city life or the joys and sorrows of adult love or the ravages of time. They were all things I would know, one day, one step, one tear at a time. But then I wanted them all at once. And now my blood, which has known dreams come true and dreams dashed and dreams postponed and dreams gone by, can still, in that mix of breeze and night and winter’s lingering chill, feel that same inexorable tug.
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