I gazed out of the car window, trying not to sigh audibly. The landscape was dismal and gray, no semblance of sun. When we left Atlanta that morning, the airplane rose gracefully over fields of fuchsia crepe myrtle and creamy silk magnolia blooms winking among the dark waxy leaves. Spring arrives early in the South, waltzing beautifully in after short, mild winters.
But I was no longer in the South. I was home. In Michigan.
…in March.
Everything was weary, from the clouded sky to the dead ground to the haggard, frustrated face of the puffer-coat swathed woman who had snapped at my children as we shivered in the cold, awaiting my husband’s arrival.
The drive to my husband’s hometown, what was to be our new hometown, was mercifully brief. I looked up at the gray trees and tried to imagine them as they would be in Michigan spring, two months hence. Delicate green and yellow leaves, flecked birch bark, the distinct sweetness of fragile Michigan warmth in the air. A bit of white on the dormant trees caught my eye and I smiled. Perhaps it had snowed. Our young kids would love the snow. Sledding, skiing, building snowmen; these were their inheritance. Maybe this would all be ok.
“I laid down a life-long shackle: fear.”
