Mary Novaria

Image: leozc/Pixabay The trees in the yard are frosted like vanilla-coconut cupcakes. Pointy icicles hang from the north side of the house. Sometimes I break one off and give it to the dog, like a stick. Today those spiky rods are rock solid, and I wonder, for no particular reason, if they really have been used as weapons. Murder and melt. Evidence gone. Maybe I’ve been watching too many British crime dramas.   In Colorado, snow falls on the roof, then melts, then refreezes. This is called ice damming.   There is also a thing called ice damning .    I made it up after getting stuck near the top of the driveway last week. It was a great introduction to our home for my high school bestie who’d just flown in for the weekend. I stopped the car before reaching the top to aim my remote at the garage door, not realizing there was a layer of ice under a dusting of snow. I swear it hadn’t been there when I left for the airport earlier. When I couldn’t get traction, I beg...

The three white, plastic boxes were nestled into a larger brown, cardboard box labeled “office” with a black Sharpie and stacked among hundreds of other cartons in a moving van, along with more than two decades worth of furniture, household goods, and memories. Why, I wondered, was I moving the ashes of three dead cats halfway across the country? DaisyBelle Riley, Mose and DaisyBelle left us one by one over a span of three years. I always thought we’d gather the kids and ceremoniously scatter their ashes beneath the branches of a towering evergreen just beyond the backyard fence. We’d say a few somber yet loving words, recall their idiosyncrasies, and retell the stories of how our feline companions first came into our home.  But life intervened. It seemed as if the family was rarely all together anymore and, although I thought about it frequently, I never quite planned the memorial service.  We moved West and the ashes of three Kansas cats sat in a closet in Los...