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The tall man flicked the mailbox door
and it latched. Holding a small pile of letters in his left hand,
he stretched his right hand toward the young girl who was standing
nearby. She wrapped her hand around the last two fingers of his hand,
and tugged. “Come on,” she said, pulling him up the lane
toward his cabin. Snow was quietly settling on the tall man’s
back and upon the evergreens that marched in solitary file up the
lane. The snow was fluffy …like our favorite dream of playing
in the clouds. Just like in our dreams, the snow was unreal, diaphanous
and ethereal and pure white cotton rolling off the elbows of the sentinel
evergreens.
Man and girl walked slowly, enjoying
the soft confetti feel of the snow. To their left and their right
tall evergreens and stark poplars stood silent guard up the slight
incline toward the man’s cabin. While they watched, soft white
wraiths flittered and skittered, hither and yon, settling into a cloud
of white that covered the road to ‘Grampa’s’ cabin.
To the girl, it appeared the tops of clouds were tossing and circling
around her feet. She stomped her right foot and watched the cloud
twirl outward, a surge larger than her boot. She looked up at Grampa
and he stomped a foot, causing a burst of snowy cloud to flow away
from his black boot.
They were two, bound by time and quiet.
He wore his old gray parka with a bright green cap. She wore mukluks
and a coat that fell below her knees. He enjoyed the sound of her
voice. She wanted only to bring the mail back to the cabin where Gramma
Ann was making ginger cookies and baking bread. She pushed the woolen
scarf away from her nose.
“Is it there?” she asked.
“Is it?” he chuckled, holding
the mail in one hand while searching with the other. He found the
red envelope and looked at it. “The return address says ‘Alison
Harant …is that it?” he said, waving the letter over her
head.
“Grampa, you know that’s
my letter,” she said, pretending to be frustrated with the tall
man. She spluttered once, and coughed and reached up to pull her scarf
down. “Oh, eeish! I swallowed some scarf.” Her face held
the deep blue eyes of a child and the pert, pugnacious nose of a determined
four-year-old. Her blond, almost invisible eyebrows were knit together
in concentration.
“You can give it to Gramma,”
she added.
“Yes, Alison,” said her
Grampa. He was smiling, enjoying the soft snow and Alison’s
excitement. He looked up the lane to where smoke puffed skyward from
a tan brick chimney. It was a good house he thought, insulated for
Minnesota winters with double-pane windows and thick stucco walls.
A long porch crossed the front, where heavy wooden chairs and a porch
swing held miniature drifts of snow. On the far side of the house
a similar porch was screened in, providing protection in summer from
pesky mosquitoes.
Alison grabbed two fingers of his right hand
again. She pulled, urging him to hurry. “It’s my valentine,”
she said.
“You know, a big red heart with lace that
I glued on the edges,” she said by way of description. “It
also says ‘I love you’ and I signed it,” she quipped.
The big man smiled, loving her enthusiasm.
Three days earlier he had been surprised when Alison’s mother
told him about the red envelope with the valentine. Alison had insisted
on mailing it in St. Peter, knowing it would reach Grampa’s
mailbox in two days, perhaps three. Grampa’s cabin was north
and east of Brainerd, on the Whitefish chain of lakes. The red envelope
would be sorted in Minneapolis before being sent on to Brainerd.
“Gramma will be waiting to give you
another hug, Alison.”
“She always kisses me,” added
the girl while stomping through the next three steps. The snow swirled
away from her feet. She looked up. In the late afternoon light, she
could see the house with Grampa’s van parked in front of the
garage. Their track from the cabin, barely ten minutes old, was nearly
obscured by the fast-falling snow.
They were almost up to the porch when she
stopped, momentarily pulling her Grampa to a halt. She looked up at
him through the falling flakes of white.
“What is love?” she asked quietly.
The big man didn’t respond. He
stood there, in the silent snow, looking down into her expectant face.
He pulled her forward, and she stepped up onto the porch. Alison turned
and looked at her Grampa.
“Let me think about it. I have
to brush off the van and put it away.” He gave her all the mail
and she turned to the door. She was already intent on knocking and
playing ‘mailman’ when the door opened and Gramma said,
“So there you are.”
The big man turned toward his van,
knowing his granddaughter would be safely into the house in a moment.
He opened the driver’s side door on the dark green van and pushed
the garage door opener. Behind him, he heard Alison telling Gramma
all about the snow and how it ‘poofs’ when you stomp your
foot. He reached into the garage and grabbing a broom, began brushing
the snow off the front and top of the van. With most of the snow off,
he moved the van into the garage and turned the engine off. He slid
out of the van, shut the door and walked to the front of the garage.
He stood and watched the snow
falling. Off to the west, he could see clear sky and late afternoon
sunlight falling on the southern shore of Whitefish Lake. ‘Just
like a summer squall’ he thought to himself. ‘Drops the
rain, and moves on to the east.’ He knew the weatherman had
predicted strong winds for the early evening. The wind was probably
pushing the ‘snow squall’ to the southeast, away from
the lake.
“How do I describe love?”
he said to the snow and the distant sunlight and the whispering Norway
pines, his pines now ten years old. He hit the switch for the garage
door and walked around an eight-foot soft-white pine to the porch.
Looking to the west, where sunlight bounced off the frozen lake, he
saw a swirl of snow lifting from the ice and pushing onto shore. Three
miles away, a gray cloud of blowing snow seemed to be coming in his
direction.
“Winds gonna hit in about ten
minutes,” he said, addressing his Norway pines. Behind him,
he heard the front door opening.
“Come on inside, Tom. And stop
mumbling to your trees.” She was smiling and holding the storm
door open for him. His wife of 38 years was wearing a white apron
outside her favorite woolen slacks with a green plaid flannel shirt,
the sleeves pushed up to her elbows. She had taken off her glasses
and there was a smudge of flour on the side of her face. Her blue
eyes twinkled when he smiled at her. He knew that she received an
enormous charge of felicity when Alison came to visit.
“She wants me to open a
red envelope,” said Ann laughing while she backed into the family
room of their cabin. Two large sofas with pine logs for legs and two
great reclining chairs filled the space in front of a fireplace. The
fireplace itself dominated the western wall of the room, with inlaid
fieldstone rising to a heavy oak mantel. Two lamps stood on side tables
and a heavy red-brown rug covered most of the family room floor. Alison
was climbing onto a stool at the counter that gracefully separated
the family room from the kitchen. “What could it be?”
said Gramma smiling, pretending ignorance.
“It’s right here,”
said Alison, waving the red envelope in the air. She watched while
Grampa stamped his feet on the porch, walked into the family room
and kicked off his boots. He hung his parka on the hook by the door
and tossed his cap onto a side table, where a pile of scarves, mittens,
gloves, and stocking caps waited for their owners. When he turned
toward the kitchen Ann was reaching for the envelope. He walked over
and put his arm around Alison and watched his wife open the envelope.
“Oh, it’s beautiful,”
said Alison’s Gramma pulling the valentine out of its envelope.
She showed the heart to Grampa, who stood and looked at the message,
without saying a word. His wife reached out with her hand and touched
Alison on the cheek. “And I love you, too, sweetheart.”
Grampa Tom walked across the family
room to the window that looked out to the west. “Wind is going
to kick up,” he said to his wife. He turned to face his wife
at the counter. “Alison wants to know what love is.”
“And what did you say?”
“I haven’t. Not yet.”
Tom was concerned but had an idea. He knew there had to be a good
way to answer Alison’s question. One possibility had occurred
to him. He was thinking about it. In thirty-five years as a school
administrator Tom always felt confident in the decisions he made.
His granddaughter, however, changed Tom’s life. His words carried
extra weight and he was acutely alert to the impact of his words.
The buzzer on the oven began to beg
for attention. Gramma Ann reached for her baking mitts, and pulling
them on, moved to the oven. When she opened the door, the delicious
smell of ginger floated across the kitchen. She pushed the two loaves
of bread off the cutting board, making room for the ginger cookies.
“You’ll have to wait a
few minutes, both of you.” She knew her husband could eat a
cookie right out of the oven, and more than once had burned his mouth.
Down the lane toward the road,
several of the evergreens were stirring. Snow was streaming off the
tips of the trees. To the west, a strong wind was bending trees and
blowing up a white swirl of icy snow. Grampa Tom, standing at the
window, saw snow streaming across the front porch; making eddies when
it encountered the leg of a chair. He turned back to the warm, comfortable
kitchen where his wife was using a spatula to remove ginger cookies
from the baking tray.
“Alison, I want you to come with
me,” he said, with a commanding tone in his voice. “Put
your coat on, please. We’re going out to the porch.” Tom
moved to the coat rack and grabbed his parka. He searched through
the caps until he found an old green stocking cap and placed it on
his head. While he pulled his parka on, he watched Alison climbing
down from her stool by the counter.
“Tom, it’s windy out
there,” remarked Gramma Ann, thinking that he couldn’t
really intend to take a little girl out into blowing snow that looked
dangerous. She watched Alison walk across the family room, directly
to her coat that Grampa Tom was holding. She saw Alison step into
her boots, then into her coat. She was about to put down the cookie
tray and stop him when Tom said, “We’ll be okay. Trust
me.”
Tom opened the door and held
out his hand. The little girl placed her hand in his large hand and
together they marched through the door and onto the porch.
The world outside was changed.
The soft, fluffy snow was gone, replaced by stinging ice crystals
that bit into exposed skin. The sun was setting beyond the western
shore of the lake. Overhead, a few bright, cold pinpoints were sparkling
in a black sky. The light from inside the family room lit a square
patch of porch, illuminating a streamer of snow crystals. Grampa Tom
and Alison moved against the wind until they were standing next to
a wooden stool in the square of light.
The little girl turned
to look at her Grampa Tom. When she did, she turned her face into
the streaming snow. He saw her wince from the sudden shock of the
ice crystals nipping at her cheeks. She quickly turned away from the
icy blast, and began to pull away from her grandfather’s hand.
He held on tightly. He stepped across the wooden stool with one leg,
and sat down astraddle on the stool. With his right hand he pulled
Alison gently around until she was in front of him. He was sitting
with the wind hitting him on the right side, and Alison standing in
front, trying to turn her back to the wind.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Scary,” she said quickly.
“I don’t like it out here.”
“Do you remember you asked
what love is?” he said quickly, realizing that the left side
of her face was turning pink from the wind.
“Yes, Grampa.” She
squelched an eye shut.
He continued to hold her
hand with his right hand. With his left hand he unbuttoned his parka,
and opened it wide. He drew her into his lap, lifted Alison and placed
her on his lap. With his right hand, he pulled the massive parka around
her until she was entirely enclosed. She was inside a cocoon, snuggled
against his flannel shirt, looking out at the sharp wind pushing ice
crystals past their porch.
They sat quietly, listening to
the wind rattle through the bare bones of the poplar trees that lined
Grampa’s driveway. He said nothing, and taking her feet he lifted
them until they were also inside his parka.
He broke the silence after three
minutes to ask her how she felt. She thought about it for a moment.
“Safe, Grampa,” she said while patting his tummy. “I’m
safe.”
“I know you are,”
he said with a smile. “Shall we go back inside for cookies?”
She didn’t hesitate.
She smiled at her Grampa.
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