Winter gnomes

As I was working with laundry, my peripheral vision caught a glimpse of a figure out in our snowy field, where our garden had been. I looked through the window again, more carefully, and found not a person, but the stalks of four brussels sprout plants that I left out in the fields knowing that they can stand cold. We will never harvest them now. They have gone wild in the snow and below-zero cold, and they have become a small gaggle of heavily laden gnomes trekking across our white field in their winter furs.

I do not want to cut them down. I like to think of them standing guard, all winter, over a place that was recently filled with so much life, with the voices and colors of different plants rising and falling in melding like the sound of an excited crowd. I also like to imagine myself as one of those gnomes, keeping a vigil between the sky and the snow.

The gnomes are standing there every late afternoon, when the sun goes down, and the whole horizon broods in shades of red. Pink light casts shadows into all the crevices of the windblown snow drifts. Sometimes the crests and valleys look like layered rock formations, tilted up at angles and pointing to the sky. Sometimes they look like a choppy sea that has been abruptly captured in ice. It is a foreign landscape to me, but I like to imagine that its wild shapes and colors have washed over me so often that they have molded the landscape of my heart.