Thank you for visiting.
Thinking about winter as it comes to a close so here is a story I wrote:
On the night of December 3rd, my mother breaks the bad news while I am pretending to sleep on the pillow that is too firm on My Dad’s Side of the Bed. The phone light reflects off the reading glasses balanced carefully on her nose and she knows I am awake and she announces that my grandfather has died with a tone flat and tired like my place in the Bed. She doesn’t say anything else. In the quiet darkness, I start to wonder how far away my dad is exactly; maybe two hundred miles from here to my grandfather’s hospital room and so I pray that God will send the warmest hug at least two hundred miles from Dad’s Side of the Bed. December 4th is a Saturday so I crawl out from under the blankets right as dawn is breaking and it is one of many inherited paternal traits. The window was frosted from the snow the wet kind that sticks to the ground. Careful not to wake my mom’s sleeping figure, and without the smell of morning coffee in the kitchen, I assemble my snow gear and exit through the back door. Once I am inside of the igloo that took a dedicated hour of stacking and carving to create I start to feel claustrophobic. I imagine that the weight of the packed ice on top of me would immobilize me if it collapsed at this very moment and guess that I would run out of oxygen in twelve minutes so I start to wiggle out of the hole in the grass boots first when something barks. A dog of course. My snow-soaked hair is frozen to my face but it is real I think. In front of me there is a collarless white husky digging playfully in the snow tracks I made during construction. He kicks up dirt around him, staining his big wet paws dark brown. I make a sharp instinctual noise and it makes him stop and perk his head up in my direction. His ears are huge and his eyes are an icy blue so I conclude he must not be fully grown and guess he is between eight and ten months old. He sizes me up with his front half down in the snow, sprawled out in a playful stance with his tongue sticking out. We eye each other carefully for a moment. As soon as I think about making a move he takes off. I chase him down the block until my house fades from view. Every time I get too close he darts away and every time I fall too far behind he stops and tilts his head curiously, waiting to see if I will continue. This game goes on with only the sound of the crunching snow until I stand at the edge of the neighborhood. To my back is the large forest with an unshoveled walking trail that my dad and I will walk during the early hours of the summer months when we go fish for bass at the pond. The white dog pauses to sniff a pile of dead leaves and then sneezes roughly and sprays them into the air. We are both panting heavily. He steps toward me and darts in a small circle, motioning for me to follow. I do. We keep running until the sun hangs high above us. On this Saturday or maybe Sunday morning I don’t think about my grandfather. I don’t consider whether or not my mom has woken up to face the day and inform my sisters of our loss, or what my dad might be listening to on NPR as he drives two hundred miles(?) home to help us prepare for the funeral. I don’t try to guess how far I’ve run each time the dog pauses in front of me or how many steps it will take me to get home. Somewhere along the chase I stop counting, lungs burning with cold air, and fall to my knees and into the blanket of white powder. When I lift my red face up I expect to see the dog but he has disappeared. A rustle from the neighbor’s bush disrupts the silence but I don’t turn my head. Instead, I carefully stand and brush the snow off my pants. I start to count my own footprints back to my own front lawn and when I get there I throw the full weight of my cold body on top of my igloo to cave in the ceiling. Laying with my face toward the cloudless sky, I decide for a fact that there must be no worse feeling in the world than losing your dad.