Last night, as the rain was turning slowly into yet another snowfall, I heard thumping outside, so I got up to look. I could see someone across the way tossing a large piece of trash into the street, then pausing to shake his fists at the sky. He threw another discarded item, some kind of round plastic barrel, and shouted something. Eventually, he went across the cross street and started seizing pieces of solidified snow from the vestiges of the plow-mountains, and tossing them against the corner house’s fence. He threw one big piece at the neighbor’s car, then bent down and started struggling to lift some more snow.

The shadow of the neighbor appeared upstairs. Whoever it was, they were, like me, watching. Watching to see if this was just one of the handful of mentally ill people who pass through the neighborhood or whether he would do serious damage. It became swiftly clear that he was only picking up lumps of sodden half-melted ice, tossing them onto the street, and shouting incoherently. My neighbor and I watched until he went further down the street.

Soon he was long gone and I went back to sitting in my new recliner, with the cat in my lap.

I sort of sympathize with the guy. I’m sick of the frozen ridges of snow, too, and I’d like to fling it all somewhere, especially since for some reason a lot of people who walk their dogs started leaving the dog shit on top of the frozen ridges, as if the shit would melt along with the ice instead of ending up on the sidewalk. It wasn’t fair that it had started snowing again, either.

I don’t know who the visitor was. He wasn’t the usual guy, who wears sturdy shoes, knee socks, dreads, a gathered skirt, and some kind of turban, and charges around muttering and glaring. He wasn’t the guy who sometimes sits on my steps cleaning off his feet, either. I guess this one was just passing through, throwing things, in a rage, some kind of urban groundhog harbinger of spring, cursing at February.