Member-only story
Despite the odds, spring.
That winter was a long winter, the winter when I was 27 and would strap my baby to my back before pulling on my boots. That winter when each night I would lean deep into the truck’s engine, flashlight between my teeth, to unbolt the battery, the metal of the socket wrench sticking to my fingertips, cold. The winter when the hard snow would snap in long lines under my weight — our weight, the baby, the battery, and me — as we crossed back through the yard, kicking off snow at the door, sliding the deadbolt and the chain, a woman alone with her child, a pile of bills on the table, a picture on the fridge from last summer, choices I knew I had to make.
I’d put the baby to bed in the room with the space heater and I’d put the battery next to the bassinet, the strange nightly ritual of my son’s infancy, something he does not remember but is part of his legacy, in that old fading house, plastic tacked to the windows, wind whipping on paint bare clapboard, the house where I learned how to move silently across old floorboards like a ghost, where I taught myself to stay up all night to work while he slept, during the winter when keeping the baby alive and the car running were the only things that mattered.
But spring came. Spring came and the Japanese snowball by the porch thrust open its white frothy blooms and the car cranked on the first try. With the new clover, I dug a garden…
