Perceptions

I walk, because I've been told exercise and sunlight help, but the sharp air seems to freeze my ears as I reach the park. In the pseudo-silence of urban winter, small noises cut through the tinnitus of a thousand cars siphoning like blood cells into the city a half hour away. My footsteps crack and crunch across snow that has melted then refrozen to blanket the ground like mounds of crushed glass.  Geese fly low, so close I hear the squeaking of their pinions. Are geese happy? I wonder. What must it be like to live only with the urges of instinct, to seek the simple things of life, directed only by wordless need and wordless fulfillment? What blessed stillness must fill them, at times--pulling tender grass under the sun, for instance--free from all self-critique and inner evaluation of motives and performance? As I pass, ice in the center of the pond cracks, invisibly, with a sound like two huge mittened hands clapping, and creaks at the edges like a screen door hinge. I trudge home, shattering moth-wing ledges of ice hemming the sidewalk. They sound brittle, like plastic made vulnerable by the cold.