The Waiting Room of Snow

“The room would keep her secrets, but the words would travel with me.”

I did not come to Amherst only to see a house. I came because my mother is gone, and poetry is the only way I still hear her voice. Emily Dickinson’s lines were her language of comfort, the words she sent to steady me in my struggles, the playful refrains she spoke when I felt unseen. Two years have passed since she left this world, yet when I read Dickinson, it is my mother who answers. So I came here, to the Homestead, to step into the silence where her voice and Emily’s still meet.

The lane curved gently, oak shadows leaning inward as if listening. I rounded the final bend and there it stood: the Homestead, unchanged by time. Its red-bricked façade, faintly warmed by the afternoon sun, seemed to hold centuries in its walls. The windows were dark glass, reflective but not revealing, and slender columns flanked the entrance portico, dignified and silent.

Birdsong drifted across the lawn, but no voices stirred. A veranda stretched along one side, with latticework that might once have held vines. Beyond, a conservatory glasshouse, faintly misted, hinted at the exotic plants Emily tended. The garden beds were overgrown now, a tangle of shrubs and self-seeding blooms, but one could still sense the intention behind their layout. A low hemlock hedge edged the front, defiant, guarding secrets.

I paused at the wrought-iron fence, its gate partially open. The path—once described by Emily as “just wide enough for two who love”—called me in. Stepping forward, the grass felt soft beneath my shoes, and in the hush, I heard the house sigh. I felt its breath through cracks in mortar, the heartbeat of a place that never quite let go of its mistress. I placed my hand on the door—cool, firm—and braced against the weight of what lay waiting inside.

The door had not been opened in years. Dust clung to its frame, as though the silence behind it preferred to be left undisturbed. Yet something—a memory, a line of verse whispered long ago—drew me toward it. My hand hesitated on the knob, as if crossing this threshold meant stepping into another world.

The door yielded slowly, its hinges long untroubled by motion. A faint groan echoed into the stillness, followed by a breath of air that smelled of dust, paper, and something faintly sweet—perhaps the lingering ghost of pressed violets.

Inside, the house was dim. The air was heavier here, as if it had settled thickly over the decades and resented being disturbed. Floorboards creaked beneath my feet, announcing each step like a trespass. The parlor to the right held its silence closely, chairs draped in pale sheets like figures bent in quiet conversation. Beyond, a narrow hallway stretched upward into shadow, the staircase ascending toward her room.

The climb felt weighted, each stair a heartbeat. Halfway up, a shaft of light pierced through a high window, striping the bannister in gold. Dust motes floated there like suspended stars, caught between past and present.

At the landing, the corridor narrowed. A door at the far end drew me like a lodestone—the room, the one they had kept closed, the one where she had written almost all her poems. Its frame was simple, its brass knob dulled with time. Yet it radiated presence, as if the wood itself remembered every hour of solitude, every line bent to paper in the still of the night.

I paused before it, my hand hovering over the knob. The silence was immense, a living thing, and for an instant I thought I heard it pulse with words unsaid. The house seemed to lean closer, waiting for me to enter.

The knob was cool against my palm, as though it had held winter for a hundred years. I turned it slowly, and the latch released with a soft click, like an exhale.

The door swung inward, and there it was—the room.

It was smaller than I had imagined, almost austere. A narrow bed stood against one wall, its quilt faded to muted rose and ivory, neatly folded as if awaiting an occupant. Beside it, a small writing desk faced the window, its surface worn to a soft shine by decades of ink-stained labor. The window itself was tall and narrow, framing a view of Amherst: meadows stretching into distance, the occasional rise of elm and hemlock, and the faint silhouette of mountains beyond.

Dust motes drifted in the shaft of light, circling as though in procession. The air smelled faintly of ink and pressed flowers, as if the room had preserved their essence in its silence.

On the desk, scraps of paper lay scattered, some folded, some half-written, their slanted script hurried yet deliberate. I caught fragments—words like Hope and Nobody—rising up to meet me. They seemed alive, restless, eager to be read again.

The walls held their own hush, but not an empty one. It was a fullness, a waiting. Here, solitude had not been a cage but a companion. Here, silence was not absence but presence.

I stepped closer, the floorboards groaning as though the room objected to my presence. A mirror hung crooked on the wall, its silvering faded, reflecting not me but the blurred outline of the desk and window. It was a mirror that refused to flatter, that seemed instead to insist on showing what was not there. On the sill, a small bouquet of pressed flowers lay brittle and brown, their color long surrendered to time.

They reminded me of my own girlhood—those years of feeling unseen, fragile, insignificant. I heard again my mother’s voice, playful yet piercing: “I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you—Nobody—too?” At fifteen, I had frowned, thinking she mocked me. Only later did I recognize her gift, an invitation into Dickinson’s hidden fraternity of the overlooked.

It was her voice I heard most clearly, alive again in this silence, bridging the distance of two years gone.

She mocked the noise of frogs in their admiring bogs, reminding me that to be overlooked was not to be diminished, but to be free.

Now, in this forgotten room, the words rose from the silence like a summons. Then there’s a pair of us! The air shifted, charged with secret kinship. I could almost believe Emily was there, just beyond the curve of the mirror, whispering across the years: that obscurity was not shame, but sanctuary.

The silence quivered, as if stirred by something unseen. A sheet of paper slid gently across the desk, nudged by no hand I could see. My eyes traced the words scrawled there:

“To fight aloud is very brave—

But gallanter, I know

Who charge within the bosom

The Cavalry of Wo—”

The syllables rang through the stillness, not as sound but as memory. I was no longer in Amherst but in my own kitchen, years ago—the clang of dishes in the sink, the restless voices of children, the weight of exhaustion pressing hard upon me. My mother’s voice returned, calm yet insistent, quoting these same lines to me in an email, reminding me that unseen angels stood at my side.

Even now, her absence does not silence her. It is through Dickinson’s words that she still finds me.

Here, in Emily’s room, the words carried more than comfort. They felt like recognition. She had known this quiet battle too, the kind that left no medals, no witnesses—only the private courage of enduring. Her desk, her silence, her very walls testified to the truth: that the fiercest wars are fought in solitude, and the angels do indeed march in uniforms of snow.

Another scrap caught my eye, pinned beneath a glass paperweight shaped like a bird. I leaned closer. The script leapt at me—familiar, mischievous:

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you—Nobody—too?”

A laugh, half-choked, escaped my throat. I was fifteen again, standing in my mother’s kitchen, my face flushed with self-consciousness as she quoted those lines at me. I had thought she was teasing, mocking my invisibility. Only now, in this room, did I feel the sly invitation in those words. Then there’s a pair of us! Solitude was not exile. It was membership in a secret company, a fellowship of Nobodies.

I realized then that her solitude had not been exile but a chosen kingdom, a quiet power I had been learning, unknowingly, all along.

The walls seemed to lean closer, their hush deepening. The desk, the bed, the window—each pulsed with presence. I realized then that Emily had never truly left this room. She lived in the silence, in the air, in the very words that had followed me all my life.

I lingered a moment longer, unwilling to disturb the desk, the papers, the fragile air stitched through with her silence. The light from the window shifted, softening toward evening, as though the room itself were closing its eyes.

At last, I stepped back, my hand brushing the edge of the doorframe. The wood was smooth, worn by generations, yet it seemed to hold a heartbeat still. I glanced once more at the desk, at the scattered verses waiting to be read, to be remembered, and felt a kinship across the years—an invisible thread tying her solitude to mine.

As I pulled the door gently shut, the latch caught with a whisper, not a protest but a promise: the room would keep her secrets, but the words would travel with me.

Outside, the air was cooler. The garden, half-wild now, bent in the wind. The path between the Homestead and The Evergreens stretched ahead, “just wide enough for two who love.” I walked it alone, yet not alone—the cadence of her lines matching the rhythm of my steps, her angels marching rank upon rank beside me.

And when I reached the gate, I paused. The house behind me stood unchanged by time, but within me something had shifted. I no longer felt like a trespasser, but a guest who had been welcomed and sent forth carrying a charge: to walk quietly, to endure bravely, to honor the silence that strengthens, and to remember that even Nobodies are never truly alone.

Each poem had been a landmark in my own journey, each word a waypoint that guided me here, to this waiting room of snow.

And with it, my mother’s voice too—woven inseparably with Emily’s—both of them companions in the silence.

As I stepped back into the light of day, I felt the wind move through the trees outside, steady and sure. It was the same wind, I thought, that once rattled the windowpanes of that forgotten room, carrying Emily’s voice into the world—and now, into me.