One Month In

Snow. Out the Saturday window one-third the way through Spring, snow. No animals apparent, women leave their supermarket car doors in soft, grey jersey sweatshorts and t-tops. A day-off man, the man strolling from the bank, stepping off the disabled ramp, cazh in his exercise tee, a fifty-year-old.

Girls, garrulously teen, move up as I do before them, in the coffee line, finding the irony at the snowfall. Basketballer-tall the woman in front, and short in the line right over, a blonde and kind suburbanite, smart I'm sure with her daughters and sons not there, she alone having ordered a sammy with her joe.

We almost collide in this tight cafe, and we socially smile and she speaks out more about this shop moment and it's clear she likes people and the years have been mostly good, and it strikes me when I leave, now very apart from the crowd which is keeping warm, and I say to myself in the chill, that we must have been -- if the right philosophy is sought -- friends in another life, where it no doubt snowed and some hardy, willful people wore their version of flipflops in cold weather, this snow.