The Stroke of Winter

by Wendy Webb

It was all too easy to take a thing for granted, even something beautiful, when you lived with it every day, she thought. The extraordinary faded into ordinary, even mundane.

Tess felt as though she should remember this kiss. It was a beginning.

tones. As though if you spoke of death, it would hear. And come for you.”

As she gazed at this dear man, she wondered what it would be like to outlive most of the people who grew up with you, shared your most pivotal experiences, loved you throughout your life. She imagined a kind of stark loneliness without your contemporaries, even if you were blessed with children and grandchildren. All the people who not just shared but participated in your memories were gone.

And she wondered, too, if it was really sleep at all. If it wasn’t simply their way of touching what was behind the veil. Infants reaching back to where they had been. Seniors reaching forward to where they were soon going.

“The great telling,” Tess’s grandmother used to say. The time in a relationship where you reveal who you are through the important stories that shaped who you were.

“You deserve someone who loves you as much as you love everyone else.”