The Geese Won’t Be the Only Ones Heading South Soon

I look at my cell phone:  6:36.  The temperature is a brisk 40-something, and I’ve worn a cap for the first time in five months. 

We have begun the short and frosted slide from fall to winter.  Like all good Minnesotans, I say this with a slight but determined smile on my face, a thin-lipped acknowledgement that there’s nothing we can do about it but hey! there’s always the promise of guilt-free gravy, am I right?

One strives to maintain one’s fat layers in the northern climes. 

The bus stop has a small enclosure consisting of three glass walls – one covered by a posted bus schedule – and an arched roof; and I wonder, as I approach it, why the woman with the long red hair is not standing under its roof, as she normally does.

I cannot see yet, due to the posted bus schedule, what she can. 

There is a man standing in there. 

At first, I can’t put my finger on it…

And then I realize, as I get closer:  It’s the dirt. 

The fine, powdery dirt one finds in well-traveled areas, places where the earth no longer offers nourishment. 

It is caked around his nostrils.  His hands are black with it, his nails, encrusted. He is wearing sweatpants, a red Buckeye’s jersey that would turn the water in the clothes washer brackish and leave it in need of a good scrubbing. 

He turns, looks up the block for the bus.  His hair, while combed, is dusted, dirty.  His ears, filthy and yet a dark, mottled pink, look like pork rinds. 

At this moment, he is, outside of a handful of toddlers I know, one of the dirtiest people I’ve ever come across in public. 

He has slept outside, in the dirt, and quite possibly without a blanket of any sort.

More than once.

The bus comes, and we board.

And I wonder what he will do when the temperatures dip below freezing.