KEEPING WARM

By Kate Bowers

While the bears and the squirrels and hopefully the poets of the world retreat into our dens for the winter, the voles tunnel winding paths under the snow. You can see them when it all melts in the spring; a city of squiggles left by warm noses pushing through the frozen grass.

There are two kinds of voles that the endocrinologists study. Both palm-sized and coffee-colored, identical except that only the prairie voles mate for life. To tell them apart, the scientists with gloved hands place them in opposite corners. The meadow voles don’t mind. The prairie voles crash

together like magnets or mythic lovers, and do not separate. My good friend tells me that a boy in your bed is like a radiator. That even in the winter she can’t use an extra quilt when her boyfriend sleeps over. I see them in the mornings, pouring coffee. Her head on his shoulder and their little hearts beating.