Josie sits in her rocker facing the east window. She gave up trying to sleep in bed, her aching hip and lower back making it impossible, and it was too early to start chores.
So she sits. And rocks. And admires the stars in the dark,
vast sky spreading over her snow-covered fields, the same fields that would
remain unplowed now that Jesse had left her.
She pricks up her ears. A noise from one of the kids’ rooms
upstairs. But it is so early it has to be the wind pushing through a window
whose seal had failed years ago.
How many times had she and Jesse sat in this room, facing
this window, watching the sky and the land? Too many to count on her arthritic
hands. Sometimes, when she forgets he is gone, she catches glimpses of him at
the kitchen sink, feeding the chickens, mending a fence, or bent to some other task
in the yard.
She shakes her head. No. Not here. Gone forever. The stars
twinkle.
She still needs to make lunches for the kids to carry with
them to school. Jeanne doesn’t like mayonnaise on her ham sandwich but Benny does.
He likes carrot sticks and Jenny prefers an apple. On special occasions they
get an oatmeal raisin cookie as a treat.
When Josie was a young girl, her mother always told her to
eat what the good Lord provided and to be grateful for it. Didn’t she know
there were children starving? It might have been the end of the Great
Depression, but the lessons learned during that lean time stayed with her.
A chirp from her
portable phone ends Josie’s reverie. Jeanne sent it to her for Christmas last
year. Josie doesn’t understand how to work the darned thing so it stays plugged
in and untouched on the kitchen counter, a paper weight for the stack of bills
that she can no longer be bothered to pay. She prefers to stick with the phone
wired to the mustard yellow living room wall. The lines go down from time to
time and even when a call can squeeze through it is rife with so much static
that it might as well be coming from Mars, but she knows how to operate it and
it is good enough for her.
A small ball of distant white light speeding from the
heavens toward the horizon captures Josie’s attention. Maybe there is a meteor
shower?
When she and Jesse first married, they stood in their north
field watching the Lyrids, their young faces pinked with cold and raised to the
sky, as though it were a fireworks display just for them. They had no idea of
what life had in store for them but in that moment, they had the security of
each other’s warmth and the beauty of nature. Loneliness, illness and old age
couldn’t even be considered on a night that held such mystic beauty.
Another ball of light descends outside Josie’s window,
following what seems to be the same path. And another. And another. And
another.
She calls to her husband, Jeanne and Benny as she opens the
door to investigate, the cold barely registering on her slippered feet and bare
hands as she steps out. The field beyond the yard lays unbroken in knee deep
snow. She walks on, following the light.
