In Albany, the snow was past our knees. On the train to Buffalo, we watched water push through, a whole landscape of sticks.
Away from the snow, it’s something to miss. Quiet.
It’s quieter in California, but it is an alone quiet and not that still quiet. Mac says it best, “Kristen is upstate through and through.” It stays true even as a mark new homes and temporary stays in a series of other places.
Jesse and I look at each other, at my expanding stomach, and I think we both get afraid, but he says he isn’t afraid at all. Will our memories of eating snow, of feeling snow on eyelashes, and carrying sleds to hills be memories that our someday-soon (June or July) child will know? And if they know them, will they know those memories the way I knew the ocean: as something of a spectacle, but not a pattern or promise?
It might not matter, but it seems somehow developmental: the winter always in my head or under my skin. And here, the child might know rain and fog, will certainly know tide and wave, and will see trees taller than the pines of my own childhood; will those things sit differently in the body?
