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The Coldest of Places

The snow came bitterly the winter after Willie Meadows buried his mother, the winds blowing so hard that the flakes felt like tiny darts.  The city’s green patches disappeared, covered by growing heaps of white that progressively turned gray and black with the city’s grime.  The exhaust of buses belched clouds into the crisp air, mingled with the flakes there like a whisper, then wafted upward into a sky covered over with heavy clouds.  She had been gone for four months now, close enough for the memories to remain sharp. The funeral mass, sparsely attended because Sarah Meadows had few friends, peopled with parishioners who saw the notice of her death, and Willie’s sister Jessica, flown in for the occasion, her first visit to the homeland in two or three years.  The priest mumbled the proper words, the censor swung its smoky benediction, then the slow procession to the cemetery where Willie’s mother came to her final resting place.  Cloudy that day, with a bit of rain.    ‘Appropriate,’ Willie thought at the time.  ‘Mom always brought the clouds with her, even on the sunniest of days.’   And even though Willie and his sister had made known that there would be a reception at the old home down the street, the crowd dispersed, no one close enough to Sarah Meadows to feel the sting of her departure sufficiently to prolong it over coffee and cake.  Willie and his sister spent the rest of the day with only themselves, awkward time punctuated only by the safest of conversations.    “How’re the kids getting on?”    “Fine, Willie.  Jamie’s in sixth grade now and doing well, and Tommy can’t find a sport he doesn’t want to play. And you, Willie?  You’re all right?”    “Ah, Jess, always all right. There’s nothing to it.  I take life with a grain of salt, and then I add a slice of lemon and a shot of tequila. Work’s good, the paper’s doing fine, and I have my life.  No worries.”   “I wish I had your attitude, Willie.”   But there were plenty of worries.  There always were, even though Willie would never think to bring them to the surface with his sister, more a stranger now than a sibling, far enough away and ensconced in a world she rarely left and into which she welcomed few visitors, none of whom was Willie.  He hid from her as thoroughly as she hid from him.  The way it was.  The way it had come to be.   So that afternoon as the clouds leaked rain onto their mother’s freshly made grave, Willie and his sister drank their coffee and ate their cake and spoke the words that measured a safe distance.  At the end of it Jessica took a cab to her hotel, slept well, then flew back to her world the next morning.  Willie closed the house, then took his own train back to Washington.   Now, four months on, the snow coming down with a quiet ferocity, Willie thought on his mother’s grave. He had always regarded cemeteries as almost mystical, the repository of memories and the commemoration of life’s passing energies.  The bodies there, each one the center of a web that spun outward into other lives, each gravestone a testament to the tyranny of time.   So there, across the miles, Sarah Meadows lay in her dark grave, beyond all sensation and sensibilities.  There were no visitors, had been none since the day she entered that dark place.  No flowers atop it, no one to clear the weeds, and now no one to clear the snow.    How cold it must be, and how very lonely.

The Coldest of Places
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