• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I called to John and he skied over to where I watched the insect moving slowly across the snow. We both loved to find wild things where you wouldn’t expect them, and to notice what could easily be overlooked. In front of us, ice lidded a shallow pond. We took off our skis at the edge and then inched our boots onto its startlingly clear surface. The ice was as transparent as glass. We lay flat on our bellies and looked through the hard surface. The ice was a window into another world, showing the pond’s winter life. Brown grasses danced in the invisible current, which carried silver air bubbles along the underside of the ice ceiling. Larval caddisflies stepped gingerly along submerged leaves and black beetles zipped about in the frigid water wearing pockets of air like glimmering skirts. A white worm wiggled through the water among the stumps of last year’s horsetails.

The ice was part window, part mirror. The surface reflected my face, which was framed by the white of the sky and the black, sawlike tops of spruce behind my head. My hair brushed the ice; I touched my lips to its cold surface and then my tongue. The taste was metallic and clean.

Every time I thought about the other lives I could live, I remembered this: What existed between John and me was a penchant for hidden worlds, for moments of extraordinary beauty. For seeing the way mist hung in the valley below our place, the way a moose would steam on a cold fall morning, the way a full winter moon rose swollen over the mountains. Every time I thought about the other places I could be, I thought about the endless snow-covered hills we seemed to own on weekend days in late winter, the evidence of lynx. Still, I wondered whether life would always feel so tentative and uncertain. Whether I would always imagine living other lives. But winter was my territory, and in it, I was the woman who could put skis on in the morning and leave the house not knowing where she’d end up.

9

SPRING

CAT’S PAW: n. A puff of wind; a light breeze affecting a small area, as one that causes patches of ripples on the surface of a water area.

In the spring, the landscape got dirty again. All winter long, each new layer of snow had licked clean the hills behind town. Foot upon foot had fallen, smoothing the hummocks that stubbled open fields, tidying up the valleys, erasing last year’s drooped grasses from the endless slopes. Now, wind and rain and days that promised five more minutes of light than the day before were quietly undoing all of that. A winter’s worth of flotsam surfaced: a dropped glove, a garden spade forgotten in the yard, the root ball of a dead houseplant tossed out the front door months before. Over a weekend, the picnic table buoyed up in the front yard, afloat on a draining sea. Spruce trees flung needles that looked like dark fingernail clippings across the surface of the snow and shed tangles of black lichen from their branches. The clean expanse of snow became a mess.

At this time of year, it became clear that every object held heat among its swimming atoms: Deep moats formed around the bases of spruce trees where the dark trunks, having absorbed the sun’s gentle warmth, melted the snow away. A single piece of gravel pushed off the road by the plow months before would melt the snow around it as a drop of soap scatters an oily film. Gardeners threw ash atop their snow-covered beds, and these sooty patches, taking in more heat than the reflective ground around them, would be denuded first.

Land was on the move. You could stand in the middle of a snow-coated meadow and hear the crackling of melting ice and the slurring of water first seeping then running downgrade to find more of itself. Having been locked up for months, water was eager to pool, to mingle. It ran in every ditch, in every drainage, and gathered itself in every hollow. It needed to move, to transgress boundaries and flood fences. A certain kind of school was letting out for the rush of melt, then of summer. Finally rivers and streams were able to hear the