On Waiting. And East Granby.

This is the dreary mid-point of winter, when fall is a blurry memory and spring is a promised but unseen light ahead, which may not be a light, after all.

This is the season when you walk down icy sidewalks to your ice-encrusted car and drive down roads that have been semi-plowed into snowy trenches, only to park on a solid sheet of ice that was once a driveway and stop beside a 1760 tavern with snow drifting up to its doors.

This is the month of cold calculations:is the snowbank frozen solid enough to stand on? How deep in the plow-made hills are you willing to fall? To the ankle? To the knee?

This is the time when you try to imagine summer, when everything from houses to 18th Century copper-mines-turned-prisons will be surrounded by green.

And when you decide, because summer is almost impossible to recall, that you can do nothing but wait. Like prisoners, like miners, like tavern keepers who had only 18th century fireplaces to heat their drafty rooms.