Snow blowing around a steamer trunk, I open these old love-letters. Some are from Jake, my Paralyzed Veteran of America. Some from my mother, someone or two from my father. What a day to defuse an unexploded bomb. But it happens in Rome, while children are handed out hot chocolate to remind them of the war. Sailors cannot afford prostitutes so trade in their bandonions, so the tango becomes the dance of the lady of the night. Anya's happiness, it was clear, was not to come from her being handsome but, with our father, from other things. The light of the storm moved indoors while the eye of the blizzard passed over.

If we love something too much, there's no way out.

But one.

Dare I take that one?

When I do, once in a blue moon, I regret the trips I never made to Europe, the children I never had, the profession in which I never climbed all the way. To the top! That height of the flagpole where the whole village is reduced to miniature and haunting at the edge of consciousness the knows becomes harmless. Even comforting, shining.

Shadow-dancing, we all move carefully this Sabbath, Sunday. I am waiting for the Evening Bulletin to come into my hands. Mother's quarrelsome rosebud mouth fades. Can one die, a victim of one's own goodness? I think of Rachel in the earlier days. She grew tired of acting the role of Martha in the Bible. The cast of characters darkens and thins as evening draws on. Little more did our father track me down after I moved back to be with Mother. Typically mysterious, Rachel stayed away, didn't phone.

Snow blowing around a steamer trunk, "You are completely surrounded by safety glass. How could you have fears?" asked Marcelle. I thought back on the thin glass on Cook Street where Ava and I had been poor, how the bus shelter at the corner was lit at night, how buses rolling from 6 a.m. till midnight shivered the glass in its frames. Now there is a balloon awning outside that very building and a sign "Taking waiting list." I thought of the mirror shattering the summer I was twelve and how we were taught not to look much in looking glasses or we'd become vain. And recalled how Mother on one visit up North had dubbed me "That weirdo in #3 everybody would point to" if I didn't do this, or that. You, Lord, are a friend I can tell all and who will never go away I thought in those days while girls from Mollie Maids became my companions, sweeping a flimsy vacuum back and forth across an area rug while Ava worked in Vancouver. Now, as my life shortens, my days lengthen. Eager, unbearably charged, I am awake with the birds.

I listen to Mozart's variations on Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star as I go thru my cooking repertoire for a winter daysplit pea soup, stuffed peppers and while Ava complains that I listen to too much classical music this is my metronome, as medicine was our father's, measuring the beat of my heart, steadying it, thru the hours of the day. The expressiveness up and down the stairs of the conservatory my strong-calved legs would take me wearing my buster browns.

I close the old love letters. The blizzards still swirls around but subsides, chasing itself like a kitten its tail. I put away the love letters. Despite Mother Marcelle's valentines, Ava's words return, "Your mother is a tragic figure." I do not ask why having so young got my heart around it. I go there every day with my losses whether or not I want to go there. The words she spoke the night I came down with polio "You'll wake the neighbors with your raving!" banging down my only access to the outside world, totally imprisoning me, these words always return, the final key. This as the pain scored my spinal column isolating for its own pain each knob of that nerve-rosary.

Life is an iron cup of water.

Briar-Rose bows her head to drink and is suddenly blinded by the cruelty of it all, the precision of the winter world steeped in medieval time when instruments of torture shone like the spikes to Christ's thorn. It is a perfect Pieter Brueghel. In love with it, I bend to etch it all inside my brain at the same time I hold my tears from stabbing that pristine mirror, in this vale of tears. Again I see the veil blowing which Flo told me about at age nine. The looking glass of the circular ice pond which had formed its tea shell in the birdbath is precise in its silvers, barbaric in its drawn death as the cutlass which cuts cocoa, or the blade which snaps the neck, the guillotine.