I’m sitting next to my front window per usual, watching. The sun is dangling below the clouds, the light stretching across my ceiling and lighting up parts of the kitchen. If I lean forward I can see out the back, where snow rests on the tree branches and the clouds cover the sky in a blanket of dark gray. The juxtaposition is eerie, as if looking out the back door toward the dark is a whole different and separate world than the front, cheerful, the sun on a January day, melting the snowfall from the night before.

Slush piles, melted snow against the grass. I have seen winters outside the city, I’ve seen the snow come and then go. I’ve seen the dark needles and the bare limbs. Here, in this springtime snowfall, the slush wet and heavy and breaking branches across town, the green seems to be emanating from the melted cracks, the grass cheerful below, the trees still uttering their joyous leaves. The pines in the back look gray and black, their green not a highlight and hardly a compliment. The snow looks frozen on the fence top.

Above the apartment rooftops, where the mountains sit under the setting sun, more clouds gather along the foothills, leaving a gap for the sun to shine, to say goodbye, as if to offer reassurance that yes, summer is indeed coming, will be here at the end of the week, no worries at all poor people of Colorado, but that I do have to go now, darkening early, a twilight behind cover, an early nightfall, a starless night, but I’ll dawn tomorrow and it will warm up, and while there may be a thirty percent chance of thundershowers and storm clouds, I’ll be there.

Mark spins from his apartment and skips across the slush, shaking it from his sneakers, glancing over at me and waving. I smile and wave back. He opens the door to his car and drives away, swerving around white lights, red, halted backing up, he’s past, gone around the loop to the main street, the other resident resumes, pulling away and leaving a second empty space, the sun disappears behind the cloud, another flurry swirls toward the ground. It might have blown from a rooftop, somewhere from the back of the house. But I can’t be sure.