Persephone's Fall

She sits where I sat on the hearth, roaring fire drying her kindling-straight hair. Could it be thirty years ago that this was I? My daughter flips her brown hair, the once sun-kissed blond tresses deepen as the weather plods now toward winter. And so do we. There is no mistaking, now, that the sun has slanted, her rays but half-inclined towards earth as the calendar marches on. Stubborn marigolds cling to life in my white buckets on the porch, and the red zinnia that my daughter planted so long ago blooms still in the back garden. All is not yet lost. But neither is there hope. They are frozen, the last blooms mocking summer and winter both. They belong in neither place these days. Like Persephone they cannot stay or move as they will. And the leaves are down, carted away by serpentine hoses that transform them into mulch. The grass has died, and the season’s first few frosts have tinged it brown. The light is stark and the clouds more grey. The winter is coming quickly now, like some spinning toy with centrifugal force that lumbers clumsily and fast.

Outside today, it is painfully clear through our reddened, chapped hands that winter is very close. Twenty-seven, forty-two, nineteen, HUT! I send her running. Stop on a dime at the garbage can. Turn and catch the ball. The football slips from my daughter’s grasp because her frozen hands are not nimble enough to receive it. And later I fumble Christmas lights atop the ladder, blue sky making way for the crispest of air above my head. The lake stays angry now, and the froth of its mood carries winds to those like us who live close-by. We will hole up very soon against the harshness of that cold.

I take one last trip around the yard to gather the trappings of summer and autumn for their winter sleep. The lawnmower and two-wheelers have the right idea: hibernation. My daughter and I would like that too. We talk often of calling in sick some day together to stay in bed and read our books. We would dine on chicken nuggets and bar-b-que chips while the wind and snow pound our windows, not caring if we dropped crumbs in the bed. Much later we would actually leave our fluffy-pillowed fortress and drink hot cocoa with giant marshmallows and sit by the fire we built in the afternoon light. We would wear our pajamas all day.

There is something here in this snuggling close, in making a fire and in craving the heat. There is something in this little girl drying her hair with the smell of smoke rich in her footie pajamas. There is something about the harshness of winter and the inevitability of its arrival that draws us in to one another and to the frothy tides of times gone by. There is something in my daughter. And in myself.