Different

Spring meant cold hands full of violets and the little yellow lilies with leaves dappled like a trout. Summer brought wild blueberries, sneakers, leeches of majestic length. Come fall, trees shed and skies shone through again. But winter? Legs were sausaged into leotards and stockings, cords and skidoo pants. Feet were buckled hopelessly into boots, then snowshoes, to trek the borders of our thirty-three acres of bush. (“Remember how your father was a prisoner of war?” Mama once explained.) Clumps of traitor snow would seek and gnaw my ankles. “If we lived in the city,” I thought, “it’d be different.”

Image: Cold Shoulder by Shawn Jurek.