North wind

Today it was nearly 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and tonight there are needles of sleet pelting the window behind me while I write. I love the sudden change.


I didn't sleep last night -- it just didn't come. I felt unsettled all day today, and grew more and more distracted and effusive and uncharacteristically . . . oh, I don't know, flighty until this afternoon when it hit me what was going on. This is the second week of December. In another few days, it will be the day my younger sister was killed on an icy road on her way home from Christmas caroling -- thrown through the rear windshield of the car in which she was a passenger. It was a long time ago, when I was only 22, and I'll make my way through the anniversary, as all the other people all over the world do with the losses they suffer. What continues to astound me is how thoroughly I can forget the actual reason for my mood, and how insistently my body pulls me back to that place and demands that I pay attention. It usually takes me a few days of struggling with strange bouts of nerves, regrets, floating off to take stock of my life, impulsiveness, and (I'm sorry to say after all these years) anger--fierce, fierce anger--before I realize what the underlying reason is; what the upcoming day is. Once I do, and this happens every year, every year like clockwork, mind you, I feel the shock all over again. I cry -- again, angry tears, unfair, unfair, she was the best of us. And then, inevitably and gracefully, like a merciful benefaction, my mind and my body are back together, and relief and something more akin to acceptance and natural sorrow sweeps through me. And then I try to remember what her voice sounded like and what her hair smelled like, and I look at my own hands because her hands looked just like mine.

It's remarkable how often this anniversary coincides with an ice storm or the first hard freeze of the year. I suppose it's natural. It all makes sense.

The door closed on a lot of things -- or perhaps I shut it myself -- as a result of her death. There was no more writing, no more sex, no more music for a long time. Now I try to share these pleasures and delights of life with her as best I can by allowing myself to experience them. I think that this year, finally, I'm doing a damn good job of it. What there is of her in me, what earthly material we had in common, I'll have that forever. She used to say, half-laughing, half in despair, "I'll die a virgin!" She did, at 16. So she's along for the ride, no matter what I do or who I'm with. Alors, allons-y!

A SLUMBER did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.