The stopgap thinking has me going again, and I'm jumping from scene to scene, skipping like a perfectly pitched stone over the smooth surface tumbled underneath pool of memory.
Sometimes, the divided walls of order fall down in my mind. Thoughts carry me from association to association suddenly, easily, and then I'm reeling back, falling in, lost again.
It was dark and humid in that room. You could smell the summer, warm and heavy, making you sticky with sweat and giving everything a damp feel. Outside, the frogs were peeping and bellowing and trumpeting in competition with the whirs of crickets and the whisper of the wind. I laid there in my bed, watching the stars from my window, waiting for the blessed breeze, and I was perfectly content, filled with a deep, quiet happiness that didn't seem to gel with the mind of a 12-year-old.
We buried her out in the back corner of my yard, right between the blackberry and blueberry bushes. Dad dug the hole deep so nothing could get at her after, and he laid her down in it wrapped in the towel she had died in. At 8 years old, death means nothing to a little girl. I knew only that she wasn't moving and her body was stiff, unnatural, all of the spark gone out of her. I wasn't crying, but my parents were. Dad loved that cat. We put lime, white lyme, on top of her first. I still don't know why. And then she was gone, only a brown dent in the ground to show anything had happened at all. I swore I could see her out my window for days after that.
I woke up in the middle of the night, my breath misting in front of me. I could feel it in the air; the charged atmosphere revealing that something had happened. I didn't have to look far. Snow hung heavy on the tree branches outside my window, frost forming lacy outlines on the glass. I didn't care that the floors were freezing on my warm bare feet. I crept downstairs and, trembling a little, opened the back door. There is no silence like the silence of snowfall. Everything was cast in blue light outside, and I caught my breath at the beauty. Only the distant voice of the wind and the soft hissing patter of snowflakes could be heard around me, and it was beautiful, the most beautiful thing I have seen yet.
We had walked for over an hour, up and down hills, pushing through bushes and around trees on the little-used path Dad had somehow found. For once, it was just the two of us. Skeleton trees danced around us, their dead orange and brown bounty crunching underfoot. The forest has a kind of noisy quiet. It feels muffled, like you're removed from the outside world. When I was younger, I would always think of the Native Americans and how they used to creep through these very woods. Echoes of that sounded now. We climbed a rise, and then we were finally there. An open field of cattails stretched the length of a football field in front of us, all two or more feet taller than I was. In a twist of picturesque fate, the sun had just begun to sink below the horizon to the west of the field, and the sky was brilliant pinks, oranges, golds, and purples. A chill in the air heralded the winter that was to come. The two of us stood there without speaking, taking in the sight of the field. "Look," my father breathed, and I followed the tip of his finger to see the arched antlers of a buck, zigzagging wildly across the field and away from us. We didn't stay long enough. I took a cattail home to show my mom, a proud trophy of what felt like an unreal adventure.
Happy trails.
