Most of her life, she liked snow. She had attended a college in Canada called Snow College, which her parents had paid for in cold snowy money from their bank account—frozen money, even, because it was first carefully kept in a large freezer in her parents’ basement and meant for nothing but her college future. After leaving Snow College, she and her husband (whom she’d met at Snow College) moved back to Wyoming, full of cattle and in winter more snow than anyone really knew what to do with, knew how to cope with. Except for short bursts of hot summer, their whole lives, even all their temperaments—were snow.
Not till late in their lives did she say she wanted to live in a town which also had snow but, she had heard, also had the purest brightest most brilliant sun—even as snow fell.
A sort of Midas wish, she said.
They had been excluded from such beauty, she said, by their jobs, their careers. The monotony of grayness, snow. They should have been, long ago, able to
experience such beauty.
She had looked in her Snow College alumni directory—not a single one had become part of that sun-filled place she had read about. They should be the first.
Why not, he said. (He, also, thought the cold they’d endured had sometimes limited them).
The sun’s brilliance in the town, they had even heard, could cure you of—all artifice. Which could bring them, or someone, anyone, luck—luck as good and
bright as gold itself.
And soon they found themselves going, driving, to the town, far away. Certainly, they had heard that the town could only accept so many, those who deserved to live there. It spat you out if it didn’t like you, they’d heard; chewed you up. The town wouldn’t necessarily let you stay in the place where the air was so blue and the clouds so pure and white and puffy and where people said the town owned their very souls. The town cured you, could cure almost anyone, they’d read. But you could not force your membership, they’d also read. The town had to choose you, just as talent chose a person: you couldn’t choose that luck, which usually came from hardship, deprivations, and becoming something you were—due.
During their last hour of travel they sat up very straight in their seats, looking for the magic. But they could not find a parking space for their car and had to park it along a slope of gravel by a river. It would be safe there, they told each other.
They settled themselves in a small, narrow cafe. They looked out of one of the cafe’s tall, old, many-paned windows, watched people passing by. Sometimes the people looked back at them through the window, as if they were framed and in a painting.
They look at us as if we are schoolteachers, skipping school, her husband said. Trying—to steal their sun away!
Well, maybe we could, she said. My bones. So cold, all the time. Why are old bones cold? Is it Canada’s fault, or Wyoming’s?
Both, he said, nodding.
They continued to watch people going by outside. How had the sun chosen those already here, to belong? These people, she could see, had eyes steady and certain and quiet, as if they even slept with the powerful sun rays stored up inside their irises or pupils. They seemed slow to laugh, careful about laughing; but if they began laughing they seemed to have difficulty stopping, as if their laughter was horses running down a hill. They even had eyes like horses’ eyes, slow-blinking. Sun-filled, but dark. Some of the older people wore intricate woolen shawls, many with dark gray and red geometric designs. Their children, they had heard, often chose not go to college, weren’t shamed or cast into despair if they did not. Many became artists or singers or writers without educational instruction, sang or drew or wrote however they liked, everyone paying as much attention to them, or more, than to those who attended colleges.
I’m still so cold, she said to her husband.
Someone very young and wearing a dark maroon and black sweater had finally brought them blazing hot coffee, with cream and honey. They were not asked if they would like the ginger-spiced honey, which had already been added, with the cream. Her husband was shaking his head, but she liked its taste.
Makes it feel, she said to her husband, as if someone made it in a tree.
He shook his head.
Look, he said. These people passing by still stare at us as if we are ghosts from the snow. Possibly contagious.
They asked for the bill. The cafe was becoming crowed, and they were told there was really no need to pay.
Are you sure? No need to pay? her husband said.
We’re busy, the waitress said. Next time you’re in town leave us a nice tip.
Actually we’ve just arrived, said her husband.
But she had already headed back down the narrow aisle to the kitchen. A moment passed and her small shoulders could not be seen anymore. They took the last sips of their unusual, and good, coffee. It was as good as medicine; better, because it tasted good. Enervating and sweet and at the same time bitter, encapsulating the power of fire, sun-filled beans roasted till they were dark, and storable.
If only they would accept us, her husband said.
As he said this, his white-haired head tipped back, he was truly looking, she thought, brilliant, wild-eyed, poetic, even young. Or crazy—as mad and crazy as
you become if you were a trapped person who could not escape his cold snow fate.
No, we can’t be accepted, she said. They won’t ever.
That might be oversaying it, he said.
But she did not disagree with him.
At the end of their sun-kissed day, assuming everyone they saw comfortably, happily belonged, unlike them—they walked almost gratefully back down the
incline leading to the river, where their car was parked, waiting for them like a faithful dog or horse. The streets of the town were too careful and beautiful and its sun was too beautiful and no one with frost settled in their hearts could survive it, she thought, as she turned the car’s silvery key. The loyal car! Ten years theirs, waiting for them. It started in an instant, its battery ready, as dependable as if they were spacemen in space who needed to keep going on in their wheel of space station, heading to another mission. What a myth, she thought, that birth was a miracle. (She and he were childless, and they were thoroughly tired of hearing of the ‘miracle’ which she and he had never been part of. They did not even believe their own births had been miracles: they had simply been—occurrences.)
Cars that the winter can’t kill off are miracles, she said to her husband.
Definitely, he said. I’ve often thought that.
They drove. They really could have wept, but their hearts—too cold to do that. Near home they passed the cemeteries where their parents were buried. How lucky, she had always thought, that the dead at last were uncaring about cold. Or—if the dead could feel and speak would they say they missed the magic and the cure of cold? Would they say cold was a great thing, as great as medicine for people? That it cleared your head, told you what was really important?
Surely a frost fate was a common predicament, she thought. Really, it was just a common predicament; and really, she thought, something you must bear, even love. As proudly as you could.
Rebecca Pyle is a writer and an artist whose work has most recently appeared in Third Street Review, Die Leere Mitte, Post Road Magazine (forthcoming), Anacapa Review, MAYDAY, and The Silk Road Review (forthcoming). Resident of Utah and New York the past two decades, over the past two years in she has been living in France and in the United Kingdom, accompanied by her husband, Salt Lake Tribune editorial writer George Pyle. See rebeccapyleartist.com.
