Moving On
Winter is easy; we have nothing to do but endure and survive. Every day spent in the lee of the wind is a day to the good. Spring is hard. The world moves and grows and challenges us with change.
Things are getting ready to happen out of sight. The world is sodden in April; the snow melts, the rain drips, the fog drips off the wires. Blind white roots push out and break the frozen ground. The daffodils have pushed through the dead branches and leaves and have emerged triumphant amid the mud.
He and the realtor stand in the backyard. She carries papers that he needs to sign and bankers need to approve, and another dozen people in ties and sensible shoes need to stamp. They keep getting stuck in the mud of the backyard, and he can’t ignore the trash. The blackberry bush grabbed the paper out of the air and impaled it onto its thorns. Wrappers, bags, and thirty-year-old beer cans collapsed in the brown and gray landscape.
One gets comfortable in the winter. The traffic slows to a trickle, the trees clatter against the roof, and you wait for the weather to liven things up. The ground freezes into one hard scab, and everything holds stock still for months. In the winter, nothing grows or changes. We all lock ourselves into the formal feeling of ice and cold and bright, unblinking stars. Time passes in anesthetized darkness, the water locks up, and the world holds still for months.
Winter has served him well. I have reached an age when he can appreciate a gray sky and a stopped clock. He has floated on the water and soared deep into a gray sky. He has eaten from the cast-off scallop shells and dropped crabs onto the wharves. He has rented out the lee of waves and leased the dark side of the dunes.
Then the wind shifted. A breeze built from the south, followed by rain and warmth, and several days of sunlight. Now, spring erupts like a new tooth. The flowers split the frozen ground, and the trees are brushed with the red. The grass has begun to twitch through the afternoon; each organic jerk scratches the air.
The realtor has exhausted her pitch. If he stands on the porch and faces west, it repeats itself to him. “Look at the view. The two of you can sit here and watch the sun set over the moors. The kitchen can hold a hockey team while you roast a pig. The fireplace heats the whole house. And look how great the master bedroom is.”
The house was designed for a comic book version of the man he could have been. The doors shut without scraping along the floors, the windows keep the draft out, and in the long windows open out into pines and pale blue; in the clear cold of February, a certain slant of light devours the afternoon in terrible speed.
To stand in an empty house is to see what could be; the future teases him. The kitchen was large, the dining room small, and the study just large enough for a desk and a Christmas tree. The house will only host the smallest of parties. It does not have double sinks in the master bedroom, walk-in closets, or a lap pool in the back. However, on a clear night, he could see an older man sitting in the cold and witnessing the island night. The moon rises from the water and slowly erases the constellations while the five-second sweep from Sankaty Light sweeps the walls. It’s a house for birds, for bats, and for dogs.
He stands at the door. A house is work. It’s replacing the roof and remortgaging and coating the windows with fabric. It’s watching the paycheck disappear into the wood and the mud. It’s taking all of the maps of the future and throwing them into a dumpster along one highway. The horizon shrinks into a window.
The realtor edges up behind him, and she clears her throat.
“We can reschedule, if you would like...”
Which she wouldn’t. She had hovered around him like Cupid, shooting arrow after arrow into his wintery back. She had a commission coming, along with three children, a little league game in an hour, and burgers for the grill.
It would be fun to walk away. It would be great to just tear up the papers, as if it were a graduation speech in the hands of some mohawked high school mind, and then throw it into the air. The paper bits would fall as if a snow squall had hit for a moment. He could run away back into the world of winter. Freeze the mud, kill the daffodils, and chill the sky; the sun can climb back down from the sky and the world could go back into its shell.
The world pushes you into this. It looks at you with expectant eyes and waits for you to sign the papers and sit down. The world of lawn-mowing, mulch, and wallpaper sits on the porch. They all stare and wait. The wasps orbit in the spring breeze.
He signed.
We are afraid of who we may become. We are afraid of the expectations and the power that we all have.
Winter is easy; we have nothing to do but endure and survive. Every day spent in the lee of the wind is a day to the good. Spring is hard. The world moves and grows and challenges us with change. The snow will not return, the ice will not return, the world is green, mud-luscious, and wonderful. The sun burns bright for us—we have to accept our own fire.
That night, he sat on his new porch with a cold beverage. The air sang with the sound of peepers and the far-off roll of the spring surf. Let the world warm.
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The Boy Who Climbed the Windmill.
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