Winter gripped the city tightly, like a lonesome spinster clutching a bleached white handkerchief. Nearly a foot of snow blanketed the ground, the obelisk that was the Washington Monument pierced upward through the clutter like a mammoth wintry spear.

The air was still, not the slightest breeze wafted over the shrouded streets and lawns, gardens and parks. An occasional auto skidded and slid over one unplowed roadway or another. A handful of pedestrians struggled down unshoveled walkways along Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts and other untended avenues citywide.

The January sky domed the District, veiled completely in a cover of flat clouds the same shade as the ground littered with snow.

In Lafayette Park, a half acre square across the street from the White House, a rag-tag clutch of errant wanderers huddled on benches, wrapped in patchy, worn coats and in tatter-soled shoes plugged with strips of the Washington Post. In the warmer months of the year, life in the park was pleasant even for folk who called the free space home. In the bitter depths of harsh winter, the space developed into a niche of abject desperation, painful isolation.

Norma Whiteglow sat still, bundled in a threadbare cloth coat with three missing buttons, worn through elbows and a ratty collar barely hanging to the neckline. Norma Whiteglow wrapped her head in a tangle of three rayon scarves she bought years earlier for a few pennies at a tag sale at Dart Drug on 17th Street. Strands of her ash gray hair slipped through the head gear, hanging carelessly about her brow.

Each time Norma Whiteglow exhaled a vapory puff the color of snow and the sky wafted from her nose and across her chapped lips. With her rheumy eyes she stared at a wayward wren that somehow ended up flockless and wintering in the District. Up until the early January storm that invaded the city a day prior, the winter was especially mild, sufficiently warm to keep the tiny bird safe and able to scavenge for bits and morsels of food. The thick layer of snow left the wren with an empty gullet; the frigid, dead air left the flier chilled through his brown and tan feathers. Water droplets froze solid underneath the wrens wings leaving him grounded and hopping aimlessly across the snow laden ground.

Norma, deep in her gaze, watched the wren try to break loose his wings. The wren trying to free his wings looked to Norma like a boy struggling to pull his arms through the sleeves of a tightly knit winter woolen sweater.

A full half an hour passed with the bird working to loosen its feathers. Norma watching the would-be flier the entire time. The bird, worn from its unsuccessful efforts, eventually stopped attempting to break the frozen, icy hold on its wings. The bird hunkered down on its snowy perch, looking like a little nesting fowl except for the ring of snow that encircled the wren rather than neatly nipped twigs.

Watching the bird seemingly snuggle in the frosty flakes, Norma Whiteglow realized for the first time since taking sight of the wren that she continued to shiver. She had been shivering for some time even before she noticed the frost laden wren.

Norma fiddled with the rayon scarves and tried to pull the coat tighter around her slim frame. She wished that she had mittens to cover her hands, her fingers. If only she had some yarn, she thought, she could even knit a pair of warm mittens for herself.

She enjoyed knitting. Only a few months earlier, Norma Whiteglow knitted a sweater for her grandson, Wyatt, and a pink muffler and cap for her granddaughter, Elly. Her son and his wife lived far from Washington, D.C in Los Angeles. Norma's son, her only child, was a producer of children's television programs. His wife was a stay-at-home mom, so they called her.

Norma actually had only seen Wyatt and Elly once. Her son brought them along to Herbert's funeral a few years earlier; Herbert was Norma's husband for over forty years.

Norma wrote to her son and his children each week. Norma tried to keep her letters to her son light-hearted and brief. She posted a letter a couple of days before she encountered the wren with frozen wings.

Not long after the bird gave up on freeing its frozen wings, Norma stood up from where she was seated. She slowly walked towards where the wren idled. The wren locked its own black, BB-sized eyes onto Norma Whiteglow, watching the old woman move closer to its makeshift nest of crystal white.

An hour after Norma Whiteglow managed to take hold of the winter weakened wren, the bird sat snuggly on Norma's lap. She had taken the rayon scarves off her own head and swaddled the wren in the three fabric squares.

The bird's feathers thawed and loosened in the relative warmth of Norma's apartment. The wren from time to time lifted its wings as if stretching after a particularly long slumber.

Norma stroked the small bird's petite head and made tender cooing sounds to the wren.

Eventually, the wren occasionally moved from the rayon scarf nest on Norma's lap, walking down her thigh to perch on her knee. Reaching the bend of her leg, the bird flapped its restored wings as if preparing for flight.

Even though the power had been shut off in Norma Whiteglow's apartment for almost three weeks, she did not notice the chill since the time she gently brought the wren inside to her small parlor. The sun set and the little bird made more frequent trips down Norma's leg to her knee. Norma realized the time had come to open up the parlor window, to let the wren fly off and try to find food and a warm place for the night.

Norma found herself very, very tired. Delicately clutching the bird in her hands, she struggled to her feet. She slowly made her way to the window, temporarily setting the wren on a slim table that contained aged photos of her and her husband, photos four decades old. The wren worked its tiny legs, moving towards one of Norma's wedding photos, a sepia toned picture of a nervously smiling couple, the bride in a lacy white gown, and the groom in a sailor's dress whites.

The wren pecked at the wedding photo with its beak, as if giving the couple congratulatory kisses.

Meanwhile, Norma struggled to open the frost-locked parlor window. She finally succeeded in raising the glass pane just enough to allow passage for the wren. Norma moved towards the table with the treasured photos and the little bird. Shortly, Norma managed to shoo the restored wren out the window, the bird flying off into the dark winter night.

After the bird flew away, Norma worked to try and close the window for a quarter of an hour to no avail. With the chilled night air rushing into the unheated apartment parlor, the temperature dropped even lower even more quickly.

Norma retreated to her chair, believing that if she sat down and rested for a few moments she would garner enough strength to close the stubborn window. It wasn't frozen open yet, it was crooked in the window frame or some such thing and Norma was old, cold and tired and didn't have much strength for such things.

Norma Whiteglow was found three days later, the weather of winter that invaded her parlor having taken her brittle life. When Norma Whiteglow's remains were discovered, a small wren sat snuggled in a clutch of rayon scarves on the old woman's lap.

© Mike Broemmel 2009