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By Root 315 0

about a boy who was raised in a monastery until age eleven, when he was retrieved by his father, who told him of his mother’s death and family’s dark past. “This tale that I am about to tell is of a little boy who lived and suffered in those dark Middle Ages,” the story began. “Of how he saw both the good and the bad of men, and of how, by gentleness and love and not by strife and hatred, he came at last to stand above other men and to be looked up to by all.” The world expanded around me as I wandered the far places of the tale, the snowy night outside transforming itself into the dark castles and towns of Germany in the Middle Ages.

The next day, temperatures dropped and sunshine sparked the whiteness into a field of diamonds that made the sky seem vastly bluer. Our snowshoes pushed through the drifts on the way to the outhouse, flakes clinging to our pants and falling in explosions from the trees. Soon the paths around the clearing became packed underfoot, our boots squeaking against the hardened snow. Heidi and I tunneled with our hands and kitchen bowls through the banks below the patio to carve a maze of passages like voles in the earth of the greenhouse. We’d lie for hours in the caves and retell stories from The Spider’s Web, safe from the cold in our snowsuits, the walls glowing a pale ice blue with the light beyond, peace of the snowstorm preserved within.

The next day I put on the snowshoes the Tomten had given me and trekked the half-mile path down to meet the school bus, which now picked me up at the end of the Nearings’ driveway. “Not many kids get to snowshoe to school,” Papa said with enthusiasm.

On March 30, Mama and Papa made time to listen to the “non-lectures of ee cummings” on Maine Public Radio, cummings being one of Papa’s favorite poets.

“Less than nothing’s more than everything,” cummings read, his Old World Harvard accent reminding Mama of her father.

Mama copied the line into her journal, one of her few entries that year.

“Beauty is more now than dying’s when,” she added, a line from another cummings poem, and sat for a while after the program ended, staring out the windows at the remnants of melting snow.

Reliably as always, spring and the white-throat returned. Another blanket, this one of mist, settled on the farm with the thickness of a cloud falling. It filled the spaces between tree branches, lying heavy in the hollows and blending all colors together into one pale shade of blue-green-gray. I watched out the window from the table while eating breakfast with Mama, as the mist wound between the rows of the garden and danced in muscular bodies with the plants.

We could hear the thwack of the ax and the tumble of logs falling apart as Papa chopped wood out by the shed. The mist and birdsong surrounded him with mystery. When Papa came in to make his breakfast muesli, his hands shook as he grated apple over the oats, cinnamon, and goat’s milk. He was often in a state of low blood sugar from the hyperactivity, but food didn’t soothe him, and he became easily upset about things Mama did—not cooking the oats right, forgetting to pick up something in town, harvesting the wrong lettuce from the greenhouse. The more Mama tried, the more she got it wrong and the more needy and insecure she felt in the wake of his rejection. Instead of fighting or even arguing, they went inside themselves and stayed apart. Papa to work, and Mama to the house. I could feel the elastic cords of their connection stretching further and further, becoming thinner and thinner with the strain.

Mama, Papa, and I sat in silence at the table by the window, eating our oats. Light from a lantern bit a semicircle of yellow into the blue-green vapor outside the window, but as the sun burned through from above the mist fell back like a curtain, exposing all that it had kept hidden.

Papa was teaching a part-time course at the College of the Atlantic for the spring semester, which meant driving the hour and fifteen minutes to Bar Harbor and back one day a week to share the joys of farming with a group of ecology students. The