TheHill

The Hill

The wind flogs away at our belabored ascent.
Humpbacked cars in rows
stand in mute, sluggard attention.
Tendrils of shifting white wispy fluff
hide treacherous black ice
on the slopes of our glorified
pole barn in the sky.
Over four asphalt acres
where naked trees shiver, shrunken,
from their allotted cracks in the sidewalk,
the eight-to-five masses
compile their comments happenstance around doors
breached only by magnetized badge.
"I think I froze my eyelids off,"
goes the daily gasped-out greeting.
Or interchangeably fingers, or ears, or lips
or some derivation there-of.
That's as much as our stolid souls can say
with breath sucked from lungs
before it can be breathed.
After five months of winter,
no end in the making,
the most bitter in twenty-odd years,
the only heat in the out-of-doors
is the snapped-back thoughts
and words of defiance:
"We are born and bred North Dakotans,
and this is our true natural element."
So we go out bareheaded with our coats a-flapping.
Forty below windchills
and the odd case of frostbite,
roads with no purchase
and plugging the car in
is just what we do
for half of the year
so we can get back to this place
and slide up the hill
for another day's earnings and our daily bread.

PamEhli/2003
Ode to Aetna in Bismarck in February
"North Dakota has two seasons: winter and road construction."

Since 3-5-03

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