The Long Shadows

There was ice on the lake, and bonfires, the cloak of a December night full of cold, bright stars and a sliver moon. 

I was seven, and nine, and twelve, and the long nights in our northern town were things of wonder, all the trout asleep in the depths, distant skaters black against the silver face of the ice – and one night, a rider on a horse – such a thing to see testing its weight on the stiff back of our little lake.

There was snow then too, heavy on the cedars, a white silencer of cars along the drive, and squadrons of birds heading south day after day. There was wood to be chopped and split and lugged into the house for warmth -- and cooking when the ice brought down a power line, wet sledding clothes to be dried, and always some kind of hot soup or waiting casserole from my mother’s kitchen.

The winters aren’t like that anymore – they’re warmer and drier now, with rain far more likely; the leaves drift through their colors late into the fall and stay on the trees even past Thanksgiving sometimes. The snow is relegated now to the eastern mountains and the ice to an occasional skim of frost on early morning car windows.

Of all my memories, those dark, cold, spectacular winter days now cast the longest shadows, as you can return again and again to a place, but never a time.

I check with myself: was the child simply overawed by things bigger and more mysterious than herself? 

But it isn’t so – I was there and pressed my face down to the ice to see the currents and the water bugs underneath the clear, thick ice. I was there on skates of my own, slicing along the shore to one or another of the fires our neighbors lit, whose light danced in upside down reflections on the ice. I was there to hear the pinging echo of stones skipped out and out and out, nearly to the opposite shore on a good throw.

But I am there no more, nor ever to return, except in waking dreams of stoking the coals in the stove, of icicles melting along the eaves, of my parents, young and alive, making us a home in the woods on the edge of a little lake.