The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

We are born and grow through childhood in spring. We live those glorious, lively, interesting years of our twenties, thirties, forties in summer. We settle into ourselves in autumn, that cool but not yet cold time, rich and aromatic. And in winter we age (brutally) and die. One turn of the seasons per person, unless it’s cut short, like it was for Gill, and like it was for Quintana Roo. I suppose, on this schedule, we’d say your John had made it to fall. My mother died in her summer. But I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction. By and large a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I’m getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside. Maybe you have a warm supper and stay a night or maybe you stay there a few years. I had one of those stopovers when the children were young, just before Gilbert died, and Daan and I were happy, even though I didn’t know it was happiness at the time because it felt like busyness and exhaustion and financial stress and self-doubt. But Gilbert’s death was a swift ejection back out to the loneliest bitter stretch of road, and that is the bone crunching grief. I’m not saying I’ve not come in from the wind a few more times in my life; I have. And of course I have my o...