Winter's Heat

“Don’t fall for a man with shiny shoes,” she told us, gin and tonic in hand, decades left-over smokey southern voice. Five o’clock sharp she sat in the wingback looking over us at iced-over windows, as far from the South as fading blue-grey eyes, and memories swirling in a glass could hold close. She had married- and lost- a good New England man who winters had spread salt on the icy path and kept the children -her daughter sitting there now- warm in jackets, heavy socks and scarves. Dinner, then plates and glasses always put away same order, same places, forty years. We sat, patiently, unwarned, waiting to be dismissed, and steal away into winter’s heat, unaware of whose reflections or future we were in.