Charade
Best American Essays 2015
Originally published in Hayden’s Ferry Review
winter 2014
When it rained in Swall Meadows, Elizabeth and I took to the street. The best rains fell at night in the autumn, out of clouds resting on the side of Wheeler Crest, fat and freezing. They rolled down the mountain, swallowing my house and the surrounding blue spruce, the skeletons of silver poplars, peaks bristled by evergreens. By November snow had reached the ridge, and the air was tangible, flavored with frost and the slow death of plants and birds. In the evenings came the smell of wood smoke, the metallic ping of my father’s ax against knotty wood.
The street that leads from my house to Elizabeth’s, gravelly and tilting to the south, is lined with dusty pines and mailboxes. Swall Meadows is high desert. The few deciduous trees that survive the dry summers lose their leaves and spend winter growing naked, branches freezing and snapping off, one by one.