From Jones Upon a Time

A few days later the snow returned. Max gnawed on a leftover dumpling. He had microwaved it and it didn’t heat all the way through. It was a strange effect, biting into the outside that seared his tongue and then immediately hitting the cold center. Max wondered if the blow pop was discovered this way.

As he looked out at the snow, he wondered why the fluffy rain was romanticized in December. It was on most holiday cards and the $9.99 Christmas compilation CDs. But come January? Snow was just an unwelcome pain in the ass. No nostalgic songs to accompany it.

The outside of his dumpling had cooled, so the next bite was uneventful. It just tasted like he was too lazy to heat it up.

Max’s thoughts returned to the snow. What the hell was it with snow and Christmas, anyway? “The birth of Jesus was in a desert for Christ’s sake,” he fumed. His outside-the-temple phrase made him snort.

Last night the snow fell, but it wasn’t deep. In fact, it only half-covered his grass. After the snow stopped, it had turned to freezing rain, which had made the surface of the snow smooth, shiny, and bristled with brown grass.

His lawn looked an unshaved mime.

From Jones Upon a Time

The snow was gone and replaced with a bitter cold. I mean, we’re talking Canada-losing- Olympic-hockey-gold-to-Italy bitter. The lunar new year was almost here. Max wasn’t Asian. But he liked Chinese food a lot. Lunar new year was a good excuse to buy exotic ingredients and feel superior about knowing what chinkiang vinegar was used for. On his last trip to the world market, he bought 6 different soy sauces. None had any English on the label; it was all written in Chinese. (It was actually Korean, but he couldn’t tell the difference.)

When it came time to use soy sauce in his house, Max would regard the six choices thoughtfully, as if trying to select the correct wine to serve with the last chicken on earth. The fact was that they all tasted alike to him. But he’d still narrow his eyes at the inscrutable labels and pull at his face purposefully with his fingers.

Now he was steaming some dumplings. As the bamboo steamer heated up it smelled vaguely of a hotel sauna and the fogged up windows in the tiny kitchen gave him uncomfortable high school flashbacks.

It was the Year of the Ox. Max was born in the Year of the Dog and he would often make jokes about his age.

“Damn,” he’d say to anyone within earshot. "I feel so old. It’s because I was born in the Year of the Dog, you know.”

Invariably, the joke required explanation.

From Jones Upon a Time

As the weather warmed the next day, the tell-tale signs of winter pattern baldness were evident. The snow receded leaving unattractive patchy clumps and the wind wouldn’t even oblige a comb-over.

In fact, there was no Sno-gaine shipment predicted to be coming in from Canada anytime soon either. Yep. This lawn was just shit out of luck.

And it was only getting worse. As the sun grew brighter, the bald patches spread like an earthy pox - the snowman’s equivalent of syphilis.

But the awkward infected-looking stage didn’t last long. By late afternoon, the lawn looked perfectly normal and the snow was an unwelcome fungus forming on the edges.

It all comes down to timing and perspective,” he thought. “Timing and perspective.”

His timing and perspective usually sucked, however.

From Jones Upon a Time

He never fully understood how bamboo could resemble a paper clip or why anyone would want that. Now they just held up the ragged remnants of last year’s tomato vines. The vines, once so rich and promising, now looked frail, thin, twisted and unstable. They were the garden’s pathetic, washed-up rock stars.

It was hard to imagine the garden once bore lush tomatoes, seething habaneros, though it was his wife who anthropomorphized the garden. She didn’t talk to it, exactly. But she regularly chided the carrots for being underachievers; she called the cucumbers assholes.

She accused the sunflowers of arrogance. They couldn’t help that they were tall and dominating. In late summer they were, anyway. Now they stood stoop-shouldered with snow crowning their oddly shrunken heads.

From Jones Upon a Time

It had snowed heavily that day. The peppers hung there still, red and lazy. It looked like an unpaid intern had edited the garden. The rest of the landscape was suitably monochrome for a winter afternoon. Some called it lovely and exquisite, while others found it monotonous in the extreme, like a polar bear’s wardrobe.

The flakes were light, fluffy; the pancakes only wished they could achieve such a state. But they could only watch, enviously glowering from beneath blankets of syrup out the frost-covered window.

As the snow continued to fall, the flakes got larger. Absurdly large, in fact. They hurriedly dropped to earth as though they feared spring would come before they touched down.