Spring Thaw

Wasted and fragile from the cancer, pretty much several steps behind from the alzheimers, and out of touch from the pain medication, my mother sat across from me in my brother's tiny and crowded living room. She seemed to be looking at me but, it slowly dawned on me, she was actually focused on some abstract point over my shoulder and not seeing me at all. There was irony here, I thought, some twisted quirk of fate that had brought us to this particular impasse, but I couldn't articulate it - it was more a sense of something to come, something fated to happen. More than that, I couldn't identify.

I didn't know it then, at least not precisely, but I would never see any of the people in that small room again. It was December then and before the spring thaw my mother would be dead. My daddy would follow only a few short years later and my brothers would move on, angry, vindictive and just as harshly unforgiving of me as I was of them. There would be no reconciliation, no re-connecting, no overcoming the past. Ours was a family of strangers who cut ties cleanly, permanently, with relief rather than regrets. No use crying over spilled milk, my grandmother often told me, Clean it up and move on.

The spring thaw is predictable in more ways than one - the snow melt will come, more or less the same time each year and for a time we will put the icy winds behind and be amazed at the rebirth all around us. We will shed all those protective layers and look up to the sun, forgetting the cold and the snow and the hurt feelings and there will be a temptation to believe in the possibility of people changing, a longing to believe that redemption and rehabilitation are as simple as a change of seasons. Each new spring brings a promise of better days, flowers and birds and the sweet smell of newly mowed grass - seductive, comforting, long overdue. I welcome it but with reservations and a little caution, reminding myself that people are not seasons and that any change is superficial, transient, and probably built on a hidden agenda. I come from a toxic family and no spring thaw will redeem it.

So I sat in this small room, cluttered with victorian-ish knick knacks and dark wood paneling, heavy drapes that obscured the sun and the smell of furniture polish and cigarette smoke in the air, an old and proper room, airless and confining. I watched my sister in law lay out my grandmother's china and silver, crystal wine glasses and damask linens, watched my brother entertaining his young son, listened to the sounds of family. And slowly, I became more clearly aware that I didn't belong, that I would never be able to make the compromises required to be accepted, and more surely, that I didn't want to. I loved the side of my daddy that fought for me but despised the side that accommodated my mother at any cost. My brothers were strangers to me, I barely knew either past small talk and my mother had always been someone I would have preferred never to know at all, not even in passing. I didn't think this out, didn't put it into words, didn't anticipate the consequences, but a part of me knew that I had nearly arrived at a destination I'd been headed for all my life.

On the drive home, it began to snow. Several more inches would be on the ground by morning and we would spend the day shoveling and clearing paths from the cabin, letting the dogs run themselves to exhaustion, keeping the wood stove burning and our thoughts to ourselves. Christmas was over and the spring thaw seemed very far off.

With a firm enough commitment, you can create a reality which did not exist before - Margaret Halsey