Braving the cold

For a long time, Abby thought summer was the best season.

Abby used to play really, really hard. She’d play so hard that the soles of her feet turned black and pitted with asphalt, toenails brown with dirt, legs yellow and bruised and green with grass-stains. There was a time every summer when the neighbourhood kids would be drunk on lemonade, living as dirty forest children, playing catch-and-release with whatever small animals or housecats let them get close enough to hold them. Their mouths would be red and wet with berries that they hoped weren’t poisonous. Abby would play when the dew was still on the grass in the morning until it returned at night. She would play until the darkness descended and the trees around her would give up their sunny mossy secrets for a darker, scarier presence, wilder than even her.

Her family lived in a nice neighbourhood then, but not on purpose. Her father, a capable but quiet man, had been the first one to build the house on their street. When they had built a home big enough for their growing family, they did not realize that their double-wide rancher would soon be suffocated by homes that were built for the spectacle of it all. Abby’s mother did not take well to the white picket fences (that somehow always needed another coat of paint) and bark mulched gardens with pansies all in a row. Her mother would secretly watch the crop-top neighbours comparing shears from the back porch, loudly asking any family member within earshot if they thought this manicured life actually made anyone happy.

Despite her mother’s kitchen table protests against the perceived gender stereotypes that were much more apparent in the summer, summer always came around and the neighbourhood would be chock full of bees and busy bees, pollenating and watering flowers. In the sticky summer heat, Abby’s mother would find herself trapped in small talk with the neighbours while taking out the garbage or after driving the kids home from school. She would watch her lovely weedy garden, rich with rebellion, grow to embarrassing heights before begrudgingly making her way outside with the shears to chip away at her weeds and chit-chat away about polka dot garden gloves.

Abby would often feel bad for her mother. She would lay awake at night on her rocket-ship sheets hoping that her mother woke up only wanting to make blueberry pies and weed the garden. Summer was the best season for Abby, but her mother always seemed sadder and lonelier, like the big scary trees at dusk. Full of shadows, aching. Abby didn’t know how to make her mother feel better, and she felt like a bad kid for not knowing how, so she would run run run as fast as she could to the forest when she woke up and dig her feet firmly into the dirt and play to forget.

She never truly stopped running. As Abby grew older, she came to realize that her mother’s sadness was more than sadness, and it was present all year despite being most noticeable in the summer when everyone was supposed to be outside and happy and sun-kissed. She still didn’t know how to help. Her mother was a stunningly beautiful, half-native woman, who had been adopted at a young age. Abby often liked to sneak around in her mother’s closet, looking for secrets and Christmas presents, and she had come upon a small black book once that contained the address for her mother’s blood-related brother, sister, and mother. She never brought it up. She didn’t know how to. It was easier not to talk about that stuff, anyway.

Age, experience, and hormones worked their magic on Abby, and she found the years speeding up faster than she had thought they would despite what the adults in her life had told her about aging. There were no longer that many long, playful summer days, and the trees became things to study, like politics, like boys, and finally like her mother and her mother’s sadness.

Amid an university fall semester, when Abby was twenty-three and armed with university psychology, she called her mother and told her that she had won a small but sizeable amount of money in the local lottery – twenty-thousand dollars, to be exact. She explained that she wanted to give her mother a trip to visit her birth-parents, finally. Through a short and stressed laugh, Abby explained that she had found her mom’s small black book years ago, and knew that they would be able to find her family’s contact information again, if they needed to. Abby hoped that this might make her mother feel at ease with her past, and help her accept the circumstances that had made her so sad for so long. She hoped that visiting these people – her real family – would make her mother feel like she belonged. She hoped that this would make her mother happy.

The line was quiet for a moment before Abby’s mother told her that she already had met them and it had gone as well as it could, all things considered. The silence felt uncomfortable at first, but slowly started to feel warmer, like the spring sun on a crisp frosty day. Abby’s mother finally filled the warming silence, asking Abby if she wanted to come over and make a blueberry pie and talk about it. Abby hated making pie, so she suggested meeting by the entrance to a trail close to them. They bundled up. They walked into the trees together, arms linked, and collapsed down onto the nearly frozen moss, spitting shards of glass around them, and huddled close, a family. The trees seemed to smile. Abby’s mother smiled, and was happy. For once, Abby didn’t hate the cold.