Fur Elise

Your royal purple scarf explodes with color against unwelcome December chill-- 25 degrees this morning, heater outside I pray will last another year, working overtime. Your scarf is "for cooler Florida weather," you wrote on an accompanying card, high- lighting a milky moon over an indigo Vermont landscape. "It's why I love winter," you wrote, where skiing cross-country with your husband goes with frostbitten toes. Girls together, we were, both of us widowed now, in a sisterhood passing the half-century mark, though I seek warmth and you seek cold, moving ever Northward to find it.