Every morning, a hard frost sugarcoats our world.
Before the snow falls in earnest, my daughter drives, logging in hours and experience with her driver’s permit. We head out one way and take a different road back home.
Inadvertently, wandering, we end up on a road in Elmore that I haven’t traveled in years. While she and her sister talk, I remember the last time I had traveled that road was with my mother and the girls, who were so much younger then. The forest drops away on either side of the backroad. Farm fields, shaved down to corn stubble, surround us.
The girls’ father was away then, visiting his father who was recovering from a heart attack. When he returned, I believed we had a new beginning, a jumpstart to what we were doing as a family. Now, with my youngest in the driver’s seat of our Subaru, I have a sudden realization that there’s never any beginning, never any fresh start, the world always unfolding and transforming — from harrowed up fields to spring shoots to the fatness of August’s harvest.
This girl — all of her, stoic and disciplined and sometimes radiantly joyful — is becoming a young adult in these strange pandemic days. I imagine she’ll carry these months (maybe years?) forever with her, sewn into her soul like a scar.
The road winds around the rural hospital where both my daughters were born by caesarian, leaving my own body with indelible scars. I wouldn’t trade those scars for the world.
Stony Soil Vermont 
Someone once told me that “our scars are the physical evidence of love”. She was talking about arthritis in her hands from years of illustrating, but it really hit me.
It will certainly alter the adults they will become, but I’m hopeful that the lessons, in the long run, will be good ones. Imagine them, age 90, telling their grandkids about the Great Pandemic and what they had to do to get through it!
And another satisfying read; I so admire your turns of phrase (hmmm, is that the correct plural of ‘turn of phrase’?). And is the chicken in the photo really a teapot, as the caption states? Looks real to me 😉
Definitely a real chicken!
Thought so, but curious about the caption then!
The chicken’s name is Teapot. She had originally been Fern, but she apparently merited a change in name. And, she didn’t protest. 🙂
Ha, should’ve thought of that. She really does look like a teapot.
Yeah, she definitely looks like a teapot 🙃 Good chicken.
This was such a moving piece. It is amazing how reading someone else’s story can connect you in such a real way. Scars are the beauty marks that let us know we have experienced love and loss and all things in between. Thank you for sharing this❤️