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Sometimes Abigail fears the snow for reasons she can’t place. Phantom dregs of trauma, the tendrils reaching distantly into the past.
If she ever had good reason for being wary of winter, it was in a time before knowing.
The weather girl on television predicts a blizzard. Several days later, it strikes.
Roads close, children are kept home, and Abigail bundles up, fretting over how to keep her little ones entertained.
Tallie takes to it with ease. Commanding the ship that is their family with the grace and decorum of a seasoned captain. She sits upon her favorite chair overlooking the garden – blanketed in white this time of year but obscured by falling snow – and peeks over her shoulder only when roughhousing gets too serious or shouts too loud.
When they do, she extends an elegant hand, calling over their oldest, beseeching him to set a better example.
Sean is like Tallie in that way. Beating his drum without realizing others march behind him.
When the sun finally sets, blush pink on the horizon, the elements wish to be heard and won’t be denied.
Wind batters the siding of their old farm house. It howls and whines and, despite every effort, Abigail cannot sleep. Not until Tallie pulls her close through too many layers of blankets, nuzzling aside long hair from her nape so she can kiss the flushed skin there.
“What are we going to do with you?” she whispers in a deep, earthy tone that quiets the ancient unease lurking in Abigail.
That same elegant hand that brought soldiers to attention flexes over her hip until she settles – though quickening in other respects.
“Exhaust me,” is all Abigail can offer as a solution. Tallie is happy to oblige.
The flurry ends, schools welcome back students, and parents fall into bed when the morning chores are finished, too cold for anything more.
Elements yearn to be felt with almost as much ferocity as they desire to be heard, and Abigail understands her place in that hierarchy. She yields unbidden, stripping until she’s kicking off her thermals and crawling under the covers. Her manuscript, the poor half-written thing, sits untouched atop her bedside table. She’ll finish it. She will.
Tallie builds a fire before easing on to the bed beside her.
“Remind me to thank whatever higher power saw fit to give me a writer for a wife.”
“Oh, I like when you show gratitude,” Abigail beams.
“It’s a reckoning.” Tallie scoots closer until they’re sharing a pillow, Abigail’s arm slung across her waist. “At drop-off, the other mothers bragged about how glad they were to have their husbands out of the house again. I never want to feel that way.”
“We’ve safeguarded ourselves against it. The benefits of being two women. We might burn in hellfire for eternity – and considering this cold front, that might be preferable – but at least I mean it when I say parting is such sweet sorrow.”
“Not Romeo and Juliet,” Tallie snorts though her smitten look betrays her.
“Is that undermining my thesis?”
“Just a little.”
Frost thaws, clovers sprout, and the dark stirring in Abigail’s spirit recedes at long last.
Abigail wakes to a small foot pressing against her sternum. The acrobatics of sleeping children who sneak into their mothers’ beds at night. Tallie’s side is empty, normal in the early hours when dogs need walking and chores need doing. The world beyond their window grows warm, and her wife is drawn out by the promise of anemones in bloom.
She lets Ellie, their youngest, sleep in, slipping carefully from bed to start her day.
It’s a virtue, Abigail’s learned. Mornings are for solitude and cultivating the self.
Their middle child is six, and her curiosity is ever-expanding.
For Maeve, helping with Abigail’s duties loses its luster the longer she has to wait for answers. A beat more and she’s twisting herself into a pretzel in that funny way kids do.
“Careful with the feed, bug,” Abigail warns gently, wiping her hands on her apron. She wishes she could be more indulgent of Maeve’s playful moods, but it’s never been her nature. She was raised for sensibility.
Tallie wanders near with loose shoulders and one hand stuffed in her apron – never as dedicated to manual labor as she is gardening and other happinesses. She raises an eyebrow as Maeve wraps tiny arms around her legs.
“Did I hear something about babies?”
“Where do they come from? How’re they made?” Maeve asks, desperate to know.
“Bright questions. And certainly worth answering. Do you know where chicken eggs come from?”
“Hens lay them,” Maeve answers as if it’s obvious.
“Smart girl. The hen lays a fertilized egg that hatches into a chick. Babies are the same. A mother’s egg, something to fertilize it, and eventually a baby comes along.”
Maeve seems satisfied. Enough to meander off in search of new adventures.
Abigail uses that moment to pull Tallie around the side of the small coop, hands falling to her hips. No time is wasted before they’re kissing slow and deep, the rush of sneaking a moment together forgotten as they settle into the worn grooves of their desire.
“Good morning,” Abigail breathes once they part.
With lidded eyes, Tallie eschews manners in favor of more kisses.
By dinner, Maeve has a fresh list of mysteries to solve. Abigail, always on the receiving end, hums as she thinks.
“That’s hardly an auspicious start,” Tallie says into her wine.
“I’m trying to find the words.”
Where had she met Tallie?
College. Rutgers. A creative writing class.
Meeting Tallie and meeting Tallie felt like two separate events: she’d made her acquaintance but the road to knowing her, to friendship, was long and winding.
It’s enough to say Maeve’s questions far out-pace Sean’s at her age, and Abigail feels as if she’s having to adjust to a more inquisitive creature in her home. This one, wild-haired and gangly for her age, wants to burrow deep inside.
She dreads to think of how Ellie might up the ante.
“We met in graduate school,” she settles for saying. Knowing her daughter, she tries her best to preempt the inevitable follow-up. “That’s a place where grownups sit together, read and write, talk about what they think. I liked your mother’s ideas better than anyone else’s.”
“Did you?” Tallie reaches for her hand, thumb stroking over her ring finger. “I thought it was my poetry that won you over.”
“I wouldn’t want to make a habit of lying to our children.”
Tallie scrunches her nose, and Maeve groans into her hands.
When Abigail thinks of Spring, she thinks of life.
Flowers and sunshine. Farmers market every other Tuesday to sell their surplus. Tallie keeps the books and says the profit margins are promising.
Put simply, Spring is hope. So the shock of death just as Summer begins its approach feels like a punch thrown with extra force.
Tallie, who has every right to be broken by her loss, meets it head-on without histrionics or tears. Her father, frail in his old age, is gone. The responsibility of handling his estate falls to her.
The trouble with Tallie’s father is that each passing year set him deeper in his ways. Contrary girls like Tallie, he said, gave their fathers nothing but grief and shame.
Abigail and the children join her in Oneonta a week later for the funeral.
Shania Twain sings something about hair gel and heaven, and Abigail knows it’s summer now. The air conditioned shopping plaza provides shelter and distraction.
“Do they have enough quarters?” Abigail asks.
“I gave Sean $15. If that doesn’t hold them over until we’re done, God help us.”
Tallie hikes Ellie higher on her hip while Abigail checks the time.
They have an hour to shop in peace, stocking up on the conveniences rural living deprives. She casts one final look over her shoulder. Sean and Maeve already seem swept up in arcade games, preferring that to being dragged through the mall with their mothers.
It also saves them having to witness the act Abigail and Tallie find themselves performing. An irritation but a necessary one: they are two women implausibly sharing their lives and nothing more.
“When you married me,” Abigail says, smiling in a way that always feels like a surprise, “you knew what you were getting yourself into.”
“Yes, but I suppose I expected you would discover better similes. Or that I’d inspire them.”
“Biscuits are warm. They remind me of breakfast.”
“They’re not so bad,” Tallie admits fondly, leaning closer.
Abigail kisses her then, sprawled on a blanket in the evening heat.
There, on the edge of their land, through thickets of pine and cedar, the moon feels bigger and the stars seem brighter.
Abigail loves Tallie’s hair.
And Tallie loves that Abigail loves her hair.
It’s long and wavy and when she puts on a CD, coaxing Abigail up by the hands, she could be one of those girls in an Aerosmith video. An ethereal babe, she thinks to herself with a flush in her cheeks.
It feels trite to say – Abigail even worries she sounds like the very writers she resents, who reduce women to a few shallow adjectives feigning depth – but it’s the truth.
Tallie burns brightly, stoking in Abigail a fire she hopes and fears will consume her.
By mid-summer, Tallie convinces Abigail to sequester herself with the intention of finishing her novel.
Her wife promises to pick up the slack around the farm with a hired hand – one they can afford now.
Even Sean wakes earlier to help, and Abigail wonders what kind of life they’ve made for him that his summer breaks aren’t filled with the laughter and activities of camp but the hauling of hay.
After a day, she finds meaning in her unavailingness.
The view from her temporary office – the spare room with a desk – overlooks their herb and vegetable gardens. From that vantage point, where Tallie collects peppers and squash in the front of her apron, she finds inspiration.
As wives, she and Tallie favor sharing an orbit. They are not attached at the hip, but should they crave closeness, it brings peace to the mind to know the other is near.
Their world is small but lively. Protected as much as it can be.
Abigail estimates they are simple people. Not because their mental curiosity is lacking but because they subscribe to an older fabric of existence.
Abigail is a published author by anyone’s definition.
She’s a naturalist, an essayist, a diarist of formidable output, others say.
She can turn a phrase, Tallie corrects them, that mischievous look in her eye. She’s as proud as a wife ever was, but she knows a secret they don’t.
Abigail writes for Tallie, of Tallie.
Everyone has their muse, and hers is the great feeling she possesses.
The American Century nears its end.
1999 caps off a millennium of halting progress, the encapsulation of which Abigail can summarize thusly: humans are imperfect. America, even more so. Built on the back of ill-treatment and inhumanity. Genocide, slavery, inequity at every turn, and struggles for equality that too often leave out the easily forgotten.
When the Pilgrims first settled Plymouth Colony, did they know the upheaval they would carry with them? Fleeing religious persecution only to bring disease and diffuse puritanism through the colonies?
This knowledge and these questions harden a piece of Abigail. There are whispers of same-sex marriage in the North and Civil Unions in Vermont that would inspire hope in others but only cast her gaze to the ground. For that which is solid and real is good bedrock for building, her parents always said.
Simply, she is resigned and thankful for what she has. In another time, she might not be so lucky.
She can rest her hopes on her farm, on her talents and good humor, and on her family, the woman she loves and the children they’ve brought into this world.