The city dug out. Treeline reopened. The blizzard left three feet of snow on the Front Range and a woman who'd said I love you on a floor at altitude with Neruda between them, and neither the snow nor the words were going to melt anytime soon.
I walked into Treeline the morning after the plows came through and the shop smelled the same and the counter felt the same and everything was different. I'd told a man I loved him. I'd said it three times. I'd kissed him while his mother's poetry slid off his knee onto the floor and the city disappeared outside the windows and the only thing that existed was cedar and the sound of a man hearing the words he'd been waiting to hear since October.
Now I was standing behind my counter and the counter was about to stop being mine.
