first snow

I couldn’t get a story last week and I didn’t want to post one from the past again, everything I wrote was stupid, including this until a few hours ago, I basically dissected it and rebuilt it and it fell into place, which makes it sound effortless and I guess it was, you know when you’re writing properly just the way a painter knows, the truth is right there. I decided over night to change the title on the novel I am trying to get published, I think it sounds too something, The Whispering Gentlemen, I am awkward about saying it. thinking of changing it to The Throw which I am not awkward about saying like I am about The Whispering Gentlemen, sounds too cloak and daggar or something, but The Throw sounds charming I think.

I woke up with that feeling again.

We left at first snow, in the dark through its white stars. I wondered what she was thinking, my mother as she clutched that steering wheel, her breath in little white bursts, I mean it wasn’t every day you left your life, and True in the back seat, I was afraid she was going to cry, but all she said was how can every snowflake be different?

We drove through it quietly, all edgeless and soft, almost like dreaming. By the time we got to the lake the sun was coming at us through those tall cedars in slices you could feel, my mother straight and silent at the wheel, she turned to me at the stop sign, then to True in the back seat, and the car swung left. 

I got butterflies when we didn’t take the usual right turn and now, all these years later, I get them again at every first snow.

We drove through those chunks of sunlight like corduroy, I looked into the little mirror at the fury of smoke that bubbled over the diminishing shipyards and factories of town, the mill where my father sometimes worked, I wondered if he was awake yet, we drove four more hours without saying a word, I watched the sharp horizon, the dark blue now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t of Lake Superior. Suze had put a pillow on the fourth passenger's shoulder, she slept with her head on Judy, my mother's mannequin, the sewing machine on Judy's other side, my mother sewed dresses and gowns rich ladies bought long-distance.

Our departure had elements of meticulous planning – she'd asked me over the past week to arrange all the spools of thread into a pouch which I did like a sunset, she'd had me tidy the bolts and rolls and folds of fabric, gather all the notions and parts and buttons and sequins I could get into a single cookie tin – but there was also a sense of acute mayhem. When she woke us up she said our stuff was already in the car, she said just to take our pillows and blankets and slippers, turned out we left the green garbage bag full of our clothes on the dark driveway, we were still in our pyjamas when we stopped for breakfast.

The waitress gave us hot chocolate milkshakes for free, as we left she handed my mother a gigantic coffee in a Mel's Diner cup and said it's on the house. We stopped for gas, to pee, and for grilled cheese twice, and at nightfall we swung off the highway, it was still snowing, I thought of my dad, the house full of drunk people by now like always.

We drove into whatever town it was and we got a hotel, we took the unit at the end, me and True shared a bed, we watched Lost In Space and ate sardines.

I woke in the night, the TV was still on, salt and pepper with a silent white dot, my mother was outside wrapped in her bedspread sitting in the chair by the door, her breath in long white clouds, the snow had stopped but there remained a kind of white spray.

I looked at her face in the moonlight – this also comes to me at the first snow – she had the non-expression that she’d had all day.

It was only then that I realized I didn’t know where we were. It hadn’t occurred to me which direction we were going, nor was I concerned with why or when.

She turned and looked at me, nothing on her face at all, I opened the door and smiled – I knew how was her courage and that was all that mattered – she smiled back.