Seasons

SEASONS

Spring comes. Spring goes.

Then summer takes its turn. The seasons change without end, one after the other, like actors upon a stage.

Be careful now because if you close your eyes for a moment too long, if you blink, you'll miss it. The end of one blends in with the beginning of the next and you can never tell when one has truly come or gone until you turn around and look behind you and you just can't see it anymore.

Oh, but I'll tell you a little secret. I did see it once. I saw it happen. I saw the summer come once and it was glorious and it happened before my very eyes, in an instant. And when it did, I knew it clearly and it was one early, September morning and I saw the whole thing from where I stood on my porch, with boxes at my feet and bits of furniture by the back of a moving van with its doors opened toward the front of my house.

~~~

My name is Katherine. My husband's name is George. We lived in a town in northern Ontario in those days and it was a quiet community and we liked it there. I had my garden to keep me busy and George, who was quiet and liked to work with his hands at least as much as me, had built a fine little extension by the side of the garage, all by himself. He set it up as a workshop and a general storage area and in his spare time, made all sorts of odds and ends and cabinets and tables and chairs in there. He made so much that we eventually ran out of room in the house and had to give quite a bit of it to the neighbours and so became very popular in the community, almost as if by accident.

The town was small. Everyone knew everyone else. In the wintertime, we always helped to clear our neighbour's driveway of snow, because she lived alone and had a bad back. So in return, in the summer, we were allowed to roam her yard all we wanted and that was nice, because near the back of it, there was a finger of wild ravine that led down a slope to the largest lake in the area for miles around.

That lake defined our neighbourhood. The smell of the water and the trees was everywhere. We were a community of ducks and geese in the summer. Constant cackling. Bird poop all over the driveway. Yet George and I didn't mind. We liked it, actually. It was always so busy. The hustle and bustle but not of people. Everywhere you turned, you could feel the hardiness of the earth. Every sight and sound and smell, so full of life and woodsy.

The second year we lived there, Samantha was born.

She had come four weeks early. It was touch and go for a while. Two weeks after we took her home, we found that she wasn't breathing right and was running a fever. It turned out she had gotten pneumonia somehow and so had to stay in the Paediatric ICU for a few days until she got over it.

For those few days, though, those miserable few days, I thought I had lost her for good. I could see it in George's eyes too and that he thought the same thing. He didn't say so, of course, because that was just George and George never says anything about anything. For the life of him, he would never open his mouth to say three words if two words will do, but those few days, that whole week while Samantha was in the hospital, I don't think he even blinked more than four times the many hours he spent staring at her there behind the glass.

I don't know if the staring helped, but Sam did improve eventually and the three of us made it out of the hospital and we were okay.

~~~

Growing up, Sam was our angel on a cupcake. She was a China doll that lived and breathed. With perfect skin and my blue eyes, she was daddy's little girl the minute she learned how to walk. I got her a pair of overalls that had snap buttons along the bottom so it could be opened easily to change her diapers. That was my first mistake. The first time I put them on her, she laughed and would not take them off again, like not ever. Whenever I tried, she would be in tears. Probably because she saw that her dad would wear nothing else either, in or out of the house.