by Susan Gilbert Guerrant

For a long time I thought the snow saved me. I believed that my daily sojourns into the white woods that winter were the balm that finally brought a measure of peace.

For months I’d longed for a sign that you were okay. And I would have taken almost anything as proof— a radio suddenly playing your favorite song on repeat or a license plate enumerating your birthday. Once when the roads were briefly clear, I drove through neighborhoods admiring the snow men and women that children had made, only understanding later I was looking for a snow rabbit like the ones we used to build.

When no portents appeared to soothe me, I found solace tramping outside, answering an inner urge to be out in the biting air. I walked miles on our unplowed dirt road and followed deer paths through the woods. Even shorter treks to the woodshed for stove fuel were full of wonder—flocked and bough-bent trees, holly berries in frosted caps, the prints of birds leaving runic traces on the white surface.

Each night that winter while the rest of the world slept, I followed my impulse to be outside and walked out into the dark. At those times my country home, already isolated, felt like the only living place in the world. Some nights the falling flakes floated down lazily, sometimes they fell in a dancing frenzy. And sometimes when I went out on clean, clear nights between snows and took in the scatter of stars against the indigo sky, the lacey silhouettes of leafless trees, the still holiness of all that white, I could feel my heart slow and my breath even.

Often the silence was broken by an owl’s haunted hoot. I longed to hear him call your name.

What I most wanted was a dream—scenes where you held out a sauce-filled spoon and instructed me to taste, or laughed with me as we glided up and over ocean waves, or played the piano by ear as I called out song titles I incorrectly believed would stump you. But my nights were dreamless. I believed you silent.

Today I came across a photograph from that long ago winter, whispered the familiar words, “The snow saved me,” while I remembered how I longed for a sign from you during that time. When snow accumulates on a roof with a steep incline, a point comes when the angle cannot sustain the weight. In a flash the snow will slide down, inundating everything below in a sudden change of scenery. Such was my experience as I stood at my desk with photograph in hand. I felt like the unwitting woman under such a wintry bombardment—uninjured, but her head covered in white, a shifting feeling within reflecting the altered landscape without. 

Susan Gilbert Guerrant’s work has appeared in various venues, including McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Salon, and on WVTF, Southwest Virginia’s National Public Radio station. A former school librarian, she now works in the public library system.