Dead of winter. Long after you’d wiped the grandchildren’s greasy fingerprints from every conceivable glossy or glass surface. Months after the last crook of a candy cane had been swept from under the fraying hem of the living room couch, the roasting pan set teetering on top of the platters stored in the basement for another year, the old sleds—the ones from our children’s childhoods—returned to the barn, the curved fronts of their rusty steel runners steepled in pairs in the back corner of an unused milking stall. Long after those seven grandchildren were jammed into minivans with boxes of gifts, car seats, snowsuits and travel lunches and driven to two distinct reaches of New England, where—sleepy-eyed and yawning, some carried by their parents—they returned to their jobs of growing up. You had a turkey sandwich and a glass of white wine that night, then read a few pages of The Sense of an Ending in bed before falling asleep with your glasses on.
The next day, putting away the holiday decorations, you swept our wedding photo from the sideboard with the creche and all its figurines into a boot box to be stored until next year. I was unable to point out your error—if it was one—because I’d been in the grave for nearly a year.
Dead of winter. Yes, I understand it is the dead of winter, long after holiday lights stop twinkling even though some villagers leave them up all year, staples rusting until some disintegrate, leaving short sections of drooping chorded bulbs, to be iced-over like frozen fat tears. “And while we’re at it,” you carp, as you pick your way along the hard pack snow-covered sidewalk, “what’s also still up at old widow Woodney’s house is Halloween adornment.” The grown daughters, themselves grandmothers most of them, climbed out the window four months earlier onto the front porch roof to stretch one of those wretched Walmart plastic spider webs between the tarred and patched shingles and the intersection of two adjacent paint-challenged clapboard walls then carefully staged black polypropylene spiders the size of Jack Russells, now long since blown off the roof and tumble-weeded away. But the cob webbing remained, tendrilled hoarfrost outside the upstairs bedrooms where no one has slept, or even drawn the blinds, in probably thirty years.
Dead of winter, I know, and after the seasoned wood is depleted and all that remains in the shed is the punky cherry destined to smoke up the house, the stubborn knotted logs of red maple that refuse to be split and wedge in the parlor woodstove door, and the spiteful spruce that will spit out its curses loudly, sparks pinging against the tin walls of the kitchen cookstove, making you edgy and worried about the chimney fire you never worried about the first thirty years of living here but that now haunts you whenever the radio is not blaring bad news or just spewing drivel.
Dead of winter, soon after the last onerous snowfall got rained on for two days, leaving mounds of soot and stone-impregnated sludge that when temperatures dropped below zero again, frosted over, resembling collapsed confections. The flagstone walkways and paths became sheets of ice too treacherous to navigate, the driveway a skating rink even the deer and coydogs did not venture upon, our skis in the rack of the mudroom, yours untouched for two seasons, mine useless and neglected as broken promises.
Dead of winter. Believe me when I tell you I know how it is as well as you do. Entropy is rampant; the center cannot hold as Yeats told us. Wonder wanders through the woods without company. The tractor clutch seizes, splitting-maul handles splinter, the chipper freezes into an ice floe, the over-full ash bucket is crushed by an avalanche from the shed roof, a truck bumper hangs from one fender like a fractured goose wing. The meter reader slips on the ice again and breaks his other wrist. While we both know it, I sense that you alone have some unstated feelings about how you now have to deal with it alone. I have never been good at apologies.
Dead of winter, shortly before brooks will babble, streams will swell, flooding rivers will threaten hamlet houses, and the probable failure of the old stone dam at the bottom of the lower lake will once again become the major topic of conversation at the post office. Ambling the aisles between the picked-over shelves of meagerly stocked Hale’s Grocery, you will be forced to face it.
Connie Randy will look up from the can of soup she is studying and catch you trying to avoid her by lengthening your stride to get past the end cap undetected. “Well, hi there, Julia. Cold enough for you?” she says, her booming voice enough to knock oyster crackers off the shelf in front of her.
There it is then. You’ll be forced to approach her with what, in February, passes for a smile, and ask about her cat, Pickles or Snickers, you’ve never cared enough to remember which. Eventually she will bring up the inevitable topic of children.
“And how is darling Jenn?” she’ll ask in a sugary voice.
“She’s fine, thanks for asking.” You’d like to set your shopping basket down, what with the weight of a quart of milk, a bag of potatoes and a cabbage conspiring to loosen your grip, but you know if you do, you will invite far more discussion than you can manage.
“And her husband, Rick? I’m so happy to hear he’s gotten himself straightened out.”
“Oh, yes, Richard. He’s in very good shape,” you say, although you are quite confident she knows—as you do—that there is not an ounce of truth to it.
She will likely set the can of soup back on the shelf and go on to tell you about her son Billy still in Connecticut, working for his father-in-law’s hedge fund firm, the three darling grandchildren.
Somewhere in the middle of this topic you will find a way to look at your watch and oh-my-gosh your way through an excuse about a book club meeting, certain that given her interests, or lack thereof, she doesn’t know you quit book club over a year before.
She will touch your wrist with the barest of pressure then remove her hand quickly, as if it is a sparrow that mistakenly lit on a porcupine.
“You know, Julia, I have such fond memories of Billy’s and Jen’s years together. We had all so hoped it would work out. But all’s well that ends well, as Mother used to say.”
At the counter you will eye the bin of dog biscuits, wishing you still had reason to buy one.
Dead of winter, before the mud will rut, sending our old Chevrolet into a ditch on the side of County Highway 9N on your way to an Easter dinner you will miss, returning home hours later to a power outage and dinner of half a cheese sandwich and lentil soup.
Dead of winter, long before the black flies will nit at your face and the back of your hands and forearms as you rake out the moldy remains of last fall’s leaves from the rock-hard garden patches, before mosquitoes will nag the chickens and horse flies will fester the goat, you will prune the already over-amputated apple tree.
Dead of winter, almost too long before the first daffodil corm will brave a lemony-green pointed nose through the last of the snow, the white-throated sparrows will squabble with the hermit thrushes, and the fisher cat will wait in the pucker brush with the age-old hope that a red squirrel might wander under the bird feeder in search of a spilled sunflower seed or two.
Even the robin may return—if she is still alive—to the crook of the post and beam on the back porch, and after she arduously crochets a nest, you will fetch the step stool to take a peek. In the basement, you’ll pull the stool from where it leans against the shelves, upending a box of Christmas decorations, our wedding photo spilling from among the wise men and the manger animals. Perhaps you will dust off the synthetic straw and return the photo to the sideboard. Returning to the porch, you will unfold the stool and balance on the top step, straightening to ensure the robin has once again laid a single egg very nearly the color of an early morning spring sky.
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Gregory Jeffers’ stories have appeared in a dozen or so literary journals and several anthologies. Awards include first place honors in the 2019 Writer’s Digest Short Short Fiction Contest, the Sixfold Summer 2019 Fiction Competition and the Highly Commended Prize of the 2022 Newcastle Short Story Awards. Other stories were shortlisted for the Himes Prize in 2020, Fish Publishing’s 20/21 Short Story Contest, the 2021 Tucson Festival of Books and the 2022 Millennium Awards. Mr. Jeffers was writer in residence at Craigarden in August 2023. He lives and writes in the High Peaks Wilderness of the Adirondack Park and on Vieques Island.
© 2023, Gregory Jeffers
Halfway Down the Stairs 