Barren. Your listless eyes played over my face, pale in the winter light. Your hair had turned white with the passing years, but in my mind’s eye you were still the raven-haired angel that I had fallen in love with beneath the evergreen trees. “George,” you said quietly, “what will our grandchildren think when we are gone?” “Well, Emily,” I said, musing the question in my head, ” they will know that they are loved. That they too will reach winter and whither away.” You nodded, that small movement I’d seen you make so many times before. Your age had come gracefully—the wrinkles in your skin added character—you were the Bonnie to my Clyde. I clasped you in my arms, a gentle embrace that I’d learned by more than just rote. Before your death we’d danced a dream-drop through time. Spring as children. Summer as adolescents. Autumn as adults and the winter we spend in old age, sitting by the hearth, because it doesn’t snow in Charleston—but the winter, my dear, comes for the survivors.
