It’s going to take some time.
I hope it doesn’t take forever.
I must have been in second or third grade, and she was a year or two younger than me. On the rare times that I saw her in the school hallway, I thought she looked older. Without a doubt, she was wiser.
“It’s a type of cancer in her brain, and the medicine makes her feel sick. It makes her hair fall out.”
It has been a cold, dismal winter. Dan came home early from work one afternoon. “I’m going to tap those maple trees.” The temperature had begun to rise above freezing during the day, and he did not want to miss the best window for tapping.
I wondered when she would be better, and when her hair would grow. I was curious about her long hospital stays. She came back to school again, and this time she wore a fabric scarf on her head. Her face was very pale, but I thought she looked pretty, and I hoped she was healing.
Our schoolmates held a fundraiser, and we collected enough money to buy an Easter basket that seemed to be tall as a mountain. I went with my mom to pick it out. A trophy of pastel beauty, brimming with prize eggs, gold coins, sparkly suckers, a giant solid chocolate rabbit, a pail and shovel in anticipation of summer days, and…best of all…a plush pink bunny with satin ears and a big white ribbon, perfectly tied around its neck.
This is probably how it’s going to be.
I’m not sure there will be an end.
There’s something so very big that has a way of clouding almost everything, obscuring the little surprises and making the good things a little less good, a little harder to see.
She was going to be so excited. I had trouble sleeping that night; my starry-eyed eight-year-old self was bursting with anticipation. This was going to make her so happy.
It’s going to take a long time, much longer than it has already been.
I’m afraid it might not happen.
I don’t know what she needs. It’s not what I thought she needed, or even what I had hoped she would want. No one knows, because she doesn’t know. And maybe she never will. I like to think she needs me, even when she is sure she doesn’t need me or anyone else.
We hung sap buckets from three silver maple trees just north of the barn. I felt a tempered excitement at the prospect of making the first batch of maple syrup in the not too distant days.
Something, some things, happened before our days even began. For that, everything that followed had to be different, affected by what happened. The happiness can still, I think, be happy. It’s just different, and maybe a bit more guarded.
We arrived at the girl’s house in the late morning. I thought I might split apart with excitement as we approached the door. My mom let me carry the giant basket, and I could feel my heart pounding with the eager footsteps inside the home. Someone fumbled with the lock. Was the girl going to be the one to greet us at the door?
I didn’t expect what happened next. There was a sharp cry, and the girl burst into tears and hollow screams of pain. She had caught her hand as she tried to unlock the door to let us in. When the door finally opened, we saw only the girl’s little sister and their mother, who spoke apologetically and appeared caught between wanting to graciously accept our gift and needing to tend to her sick, and now injured, child. The little sister stared at the fancy basket; her eyes were wide as saucers. I hoped the girl would share. I wished that I had something to give the girl to make her feel better.
I felt a little like crying on the way home. I, perhaps selfishly, was disappointed that the girl did not delight in the basket that we brought her. She couldn’t; not then. There was something much bigger getting in the way.
The girl didn’t come back to school anymore after Easter vacation. I secretly hoped that she had been able to enjoy the suckers and the chocolates. Surely she loved the magnificent pink bunny. We learned that the girl died before the summer came.
My girl will, I hope, find her own sort of happiness, despite the big stuff that tries to get in the way.
On a property full of barren trees, sloppy puddles that freeze in the night and never quite go away, and the aftermath of last year’s garden, sweet sap begins to drip, slowly but steadily from the old trees that had been all but forgotten. This is a gift to herald the sweetness of days to come, a gift that has found its way from deep within, when it seemed there was nothing left to give.
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