reaching up

     The snow has melted, and the ground is bear and dry. Crumpled, delicate, leaves get blown across cracked dirt roads. Their autumn color now faded into a subtle and drab brown. The sky looms overhead, a pail, blue, with scattered gray clouds and the sun that peaks out from behind as the clouds travel slowly across the horizon. Everything appears still and undisturbed. The trees stand tall and unmoved as the sharp, frigid wind wind blows against their cracked, raw, branches that are speckled with different shades and reaching outwards in any direction away from their trunks. Some of the branches at the tops of the trees look as if they are thin fingers reaching for the sky. Stretching up, up, up...
      I reach my own hand up and feel pleasure as the sun breaks through the slight cracks in the clouds to warm my skin. The world around me continues to be cold. My lips are chapped and my hands are clammy. Except my fingers, which if only in that moment seem to hold the sun.