The Snow Child

by Eowyn Ivey

Why was it always the woman’s fate to pace and fret and wait?

She seemed to him both powerful and delicate, like a wild thing that thrives in its place but withers when stolen away.

We are allowed to do that, are we not Mabel? To invent our own endings and choose joy over sorrow?

Was it as Ada had suggested, that we can choose our own endings, joy over sorrow? Or does the cruel world just give and take, give and take, while we flounder through the wilderness?

You did not have to understand miracles to believe in them, and in fact Mabel had come to suspect the opposite. To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as you were able before it slipped like water between your fingers.

This is the perfect cozy winter read so far.

Perhaps it was fate. Everything had led to this moment when at last her wish was granted.

Mabel was angry at the injustice of it—that she should have wanted a baby so dearly and be denied one, and that this young girl should be cursed with one as a burden she might not have the strength to bear.

It hadn’t happened instantly, the way he had always imagined, with a gush of blood and a piercing wail, but instead fatherhood had arrived quietly, gradually, over the course of years, and he had been blind to it. And now, just as he finally understood that a daughter had been flitting in and out of his life, now he was being asked to let her go.

wish to be the mother you are to me, she said so softly Mabel doubted her own ears. But those were the words she spoke, and Mabel took them into her heart and held them there forever.