On February 8th, forty six years ago Sandra Brown zipped her daughter, Nora, up to her neck in a scratchy canvas duffle insulated with lavender scented fabric scraps. She then molded the baby onto her chest. The baby hugged like a vice.
Sandra buttoned the baby inside her coat and hugged back. "We'll always be inside you," she said. She un-gloved her right hand, dipped it into a leather pouch hanging at the waist of her coat and sprinkled the baby's forehead.
Nora Brown fell motionless, eyes shut.
Sandra reversed and trudged against waist high snow into a small woods. Her improvised boots constructed from plastic and hides wrapped in lumpy layers around canvas shoes crunched twice as loud for her left as for her right.
Their daytime home and all possessions squished left and right on Sandra's back...everything tattered black so they blended with the shadows.
Sandra slithered into a clearing lit by the ambient glow of the type of old farm house depressed painters paint when they want to say something nice about the world. She could make out shapes lurking a few feet away in all directions. "This is it, Nora." She spun three hundred sixty degrees on her left boot.
Sandra inched to the back porch. The elderly man who lived here with his older wife always shoveled the porches and walkways until smooth... as if a barber had shaved them with a sharp blade. Sandra peeked back as the slushy snow covered her tracks.
She pushed against the warm walls and peeped around the far left corner. Shadows moped out of the window onto the wraparound walkway. She crouched and dropped her pack in the patch of black near the corner of the porch. Then she was wedged behind the rough oak tree perfectly poised fifty five feet perpendicular to the picture widows lining the southern wall. The wind infused with sweet nutty aroma as it poured around the trunk.
Inside, a well fed, average height man led his equally well fed, average wife in a waltz on the dirt brown oval rug in the living room. Dingy prints of average looking relatives rattled in rhythm all over the facing wall.
The paint used to have been an eggshell cream. It had turned a matte gray except for the color that peeked from behind the edges of the rocking frames.
The man's black dinner jacket burst at the seams over a white t-shirt and overalls. The woman's powder blue dress looked new, but was shrinking from several years of baking pies and overdone Sunday dinners.
Sandra scanned the rest of the house while swaying left and right to the couple's rhythm. "This is it, Nora," She said.
For Three hundred and five days, Sandra spied with Nora. The old couple fought. They scattered dust and patched holes. They laughed and clutched their bellies... Every Friday night, they swayed to the same songs.
On the three hundred and sixth day, Sandra brought Nora while the cold sun hang low and rang the bell.