My sister followed as he wheeled around the nursing home, looking for the brother who has never come to see him, a brother he thinks today is his roommate. Every two weeks it is her turn to drive my delusional mother, herself reduced to a walker, but the bite of her malice no less sharp, up to see him. And I was driving, running late again, she is texting me, angry and scared and sad.

By the time I get there, he's back in his bed, and ready for the usual telling of stories. He grins, as if glad to see me, and I start putting away his clothes, trying to avoid arguing with my mother about what goes on what hangers. I can see my sister is exhausted.

While I talk, I bring up a doughnut shop of our youth. My brother smiles in recognition, and I describe the place where I had my first bear claw and apple fritter. My mother doesn't remember.

The following was first published on my personal Substack on July 18, 2023. In one corner of my father’s backyard is a small rock garden shaded by a young cedar tree. My sister Sherry’s ashes are buried beneath the tree, per her wishes. A plaque engraved with her name, birth, and death years on it leans against the base. The day after my mom died earlier this year, I was pacing the yard in the…

Uncle Leroy Was a Country Singer

Leroy Lane in the center, standing, holding packages. Uncle Leroy died in January 1972. I was 4 years old, and would not turn 5 till November that year. That surprised me when I looked up his obituary. I have always remembered him so clearly, I forgot just how young I was. He was tall with narrow shoulders and he walked with the kind of hybrid cane and crutch that has handles and elbow braces.…

I am 9 and crouching at a treeline. The snow is blowing across the field, obscuring the copse of trees in the center of that field, 75 yards to my left. I know he is in there. My enemy. 

My enemy is the neighbor kid, Bobby Loper. Bobby is blond and wears glasses with frames that are 10 years out of date. He lives with his mother in the trailer next door. He often comes to the bus stop eating cold toast which I know he has made himself. 

Hiding in the trees, Bobby is a German. He carries my brother's old BB gun, which no longer works. I carry a facsimile musket bought at some idiotic 4th of July festival, like a good American. 

A wild boy's war whoop echoes over the snowbound field. The German is coming. I go to meet him, my own war cry rising. I run hard, through the ankle-deep snow.

******

Mark and I walk in the snow in search of a hill. I am 16, he is 17. It's not like Nashville, Tennessee gets that much snow. When it does, old sleds are dragged from dark sheds and even boys with driver's licenses in their wallets seek hills where they will slice face-first into the icy wind and for a moment revel in unchecked speed and momentum. 

Mark and I find a great hill just 3 blocks from his house and I nearly die hurtling across the main road at the bottom, which parallels a deep creek that frequently floods in spring. 

Later as the snow continues falling Mark makes burgers that are pink in the center. 

He is dead just two years later. He dies in the spring in the green countryside on a dark road, early lightning bugs rising all around.

****** 

In spite of the weather forecasts, which seem too dire to be real, I tell my wife not to worry and I leave. It is 12:15 a.m. and within 2 minutes of leaving our apartment, the snow is too heavy for my windshield wipers to keep up. I stop in a liquor store parking lot and shove it off.

Somehow I make it to work. 

While I'm there, over 2 feet of snow inundate an unprepared city. There is lightning, and thunder. I am watching out an office window when the power on the other side of the river goes, putting the apartment I share with my wife in the dark. 

My job is usually introducing classical music to manic depressives and night owls but eventually the radio station where I work is the only one with a working transmitter. During a 500-year blizzard I am one of the only voices on the airwaves reading updates from the state highway patrol and the newswire.

My wife and I sleep on a friend's floor for a week because it takes so long to get the power working in our building.

****** 

I walk just under a mile, routing around the occasional stretch of un-shoveled sidewalk. In less than 3 weeks  5 feet of snow have fallen on this city, and most of it has stayed. Several times I have to wait for cars to pass before I walk in the street. There is no end to the snow in sight.

At the grocery, I buy over $150 of goods. The teen checkout kid and bagger carefully pack it all in reusable bags. They banter as they work in their broad and raucous New England accents. Everyone where I'm from seems to think the regional accent here is ridiculous. I love it.

I carry it all home in my reusable bags. As I walk, my 47-year-old shoulders start to burn, and the snow begins to fall again. 

I come from a place where snow is rare, and to children wishing for a respite from school, precious, when it arrives. I now live in a city that regularly places in the top 10 of "most snowy" cities in the United States. 

Once the storms start coming in late January or early February, I often find myself drinking gin and standing at a window staring at flakes lacing tapestries of silence under streetlights. I watch night-owl or manic depressive neighbors pushing futile snow blowers. I marvel at fighters brutalizing their vehicles' transmissions on the steep cross-street. Sometimes they give up halfway to the top of the street and their cars do a slow and balletic slide back to the intersection, then drive slowly away. 

I walk wherever I need to go when the snow is at its worst, and always do so alone. Bobby Loper is a faded kodachrome memory. Mark is a ghost. My first wife and I are 15 years divorced and live on opposite corners of the country. I have aged and now face the snow with nothing but music in headphones. 

I face the snow, but I still dream. I still watch the snow. I still search as I walk in the white for that proper hill, and that moment of careening, almost out of control.