The old man, sitting at his shack entrance repairing shoes, reassured those who listened that only once in his lifetime had the winter not come. It had happened far back when he was just a child.
Then, to their surprise, the heat continued past the harvest, awakening people’s hopes of a pleasant extended summer. To the dismay of most, however, in no time the wells dried; the chickens began laying hard eggs, and many of the people working in the fields got sick and died from lack of perspiration.
Soon, the town began praying for a change of seasons. Such was the chaos at the time.
Since then, the shoemakers’ mission had been to remind each and every one that fall and winter were not evil seasons, as many thought, but a welcome break. It was a time for the body to have a rest from the burning sun, and for the desert to play free running down the narrow streets. Few, however, saw it that way and many thought that it was all simply a fantasy made up by the old man’s imagination.
“He is a bit crazy,” murmured the same old women, also suspicious of Pete’s garden, often.
This year, since the last day of fall, time went crawling by, despite everyone’s complaints. Almost imperceptibly, the sun became shyer and softer, every day as it always did when the grey clouds appeared, never-ending, on the horizon. Even the children began restraining their after-school play time outside. Dusk came earlier and the shadows and apparitions, nourished by darkness, began to run free before the children were asleep, or so most believed. Thus parents, always looking for ways to rein in their children earlier, told them that it was prudent to stay at home playing cards by candlelight rather than risking confronting playful ghosts in the narrow passageways outside.
∞
One day, without much warning, mountains of dry grass balls came into sight in the town. Pushed by the constant subtle whistling wind, soon after brushing the adobe walls, the errant spheres came to rest at the end of blind alleys and against fences along the fields.
When the grass balls stopped coming, a golden wind blew sand, creating blonde snakes running in all directions. In no time, the sand stuffed crevasses and piled up along walls, threatening to submerge some of the smaller, older houses. As days became shorter and the winds less and less predictable, on some mornings people woke up to howling sand storms that only lasted a few hours but paralyzed life for days.
Following freezing nights and wailing winds, people dealt with the menace by loading large straw buckets with the unwelcome sand. Like a procession of lost souls, they dumped the sand far away, beyond the limits of the town. In spite of these efforts, by the final weeks of winter, the sand was driving everyone crazy. The fine dust had invaded everything, forcing young and old into liquid diets to avoid the sound of their teeth crushing tiny stones when eating solid food.
∞
