The Pond Nine Fathers Flooded

The town I had stopped seeing

I want to say something here about being a widow in a small town, because I think it matters to how this ended.

People are kind. I do not want to say they are not. The casseroles were real and the cards were real and the hands on my shoulder at the funeral were real.

But kindness in the first month is a flood, and then it recedes, the way all floods do, and it leaves you standing in a quiet house. By January most people have gone back to their own lives, which is right and natural, and you are left to figure out how to be a person who used to be half of something and is now a whole of something much smaller.

I had let myself get small. I had stopped going to the Tuesday quilting at the Lutheran church. I had stopped keeping the bird feeders full. I ate standing up at the counter. I told myself I was fine, that I was just tired, that spring would be different.

What I was, was closing one window at a time.

I did not know that until I was standing at the fire barrel on the fifth night with a thermos in my hands, warm all the way through, laughing at something one of the young fathers said about his wife’s cocoa, and I realized it was the first time I had laughed in the dark since October.

Grief had taught me not to look out the back window. Nine young fathers with shovels taught me to open the door.

They did not do it on purpose. If you had told Danny Kessler he was pulling a sixty-six year old widow back into the world of the living, he would have turned red and said he just wanted the kids to have the ice. But that is what he was doing. That is what all nine of them were doing, whether they knew it or not.

Walt would have known it. Walt understood that the pond was never really about the ice. It was about who came to stand around it.