I am terrible at math. I had a teacher in 9th grade who thought she knew me. Why does two plus two always have to equal four? I complained to her one day. I hate absolutes. She shook her head. No. You don’t. You love absolutes. You just do not like numbers because they do not bend to your emotional appeals. She stood smugly in the classroom, holding a piece of chalk. She appeared to marvel at the powers of her own perception. I did not agree or disagree, instead, I abandoned the math problem. I left her extra-help session and headed down to the library to read. I knew she would continue to add me up as sum. I did not have to be there to witness.

I hate numbers but I love words. When I was small, my grandfather use to read words out of the dictionary.  Unfamiliar words, weighty and multi-syllabic. He would read a word and encourage me to guess at the meaning. It never mattered if I knew the correct definition. My grandfather believed that words were more than what a dictionary implied. He taught me that the basis of all good stories was to rely on my instinct and leave the rest to chance.

The other day I was driving my car on a road that was punctuated with power lines. These lines looked like a series of raised crosses or the masts of ships. I was open to either interpretation. As I drove, I imagined the plot for a short story. There was a man and a woman. They journeyed together, but remained separate. She sat with her hands neatly folded and wondered what would happen to her body when she died. She wished for more than the maggoty rot of decomposing bones buried underneath black earth.  I could clearly see her profile as she turned to the man, whose hands appeared like risk holding only loosely the steering wheel. She wanted answers he did not have. She recognized her own fault was to admire someone more than she admired herself. She saw power lines dotting the landscape like death. He saw the masts of ships with eyes as rouge as the dream he had of pirates. This man and woman were bereft of words, but not of stories. I write these people down and I think about how their narrative informs my own life.

There are very few things in my life that are absolute. I am a woman. I love my family. I like to tell stories. I write to figure myself out. Yet, I am often unrecognizable. I think it is arrogance to feel you can pin a person down just because they have an aversion to math. I am and I am not the woman in that car. I use to fear worms. I don’t anymore. When I was small, my grandfather taught me to be self-indulgent by affixing my own meanings and interpretations to things that others saw as fact. Imagination is born from just that sort of daring. When I write, emotions and logic sometimes blur. I am okay with that. Some things I write are fiction. Some things I write are fact. What fills the spaces in between are a million interpretations. Me. You.

We have entered into the stage of why and how? This is a new terrain of accountability. I find myself off balance.

How make snow, Mommy?

The first time it snowed in my motherhood, Bug was only five-months-old. I bundled him thick and warm and took him outside. I let the snow bless him; snowflakes on skin as translucent as weather. Back inside, I laid him safely on my chest. I told him make believe stories of fairy-tale queens who swept their crystal-tipped wands to dust the backyard to powder while little boys slept.

How make snow, Mommy?

Cumulus

Stratus

Cirrus

Nimbus. 

I do not have the answers.

I want to know how long my mythology can stretch before he comes looking for the fast and the firm. I am grabbing up the years with greedy hands, tallying on my fingers how long will I remain his magic. 

Before the bells ring and the steady stream of thick yellow buses come to take him to straight as row classes with teachers who smell of some foreign perfume, I want to be the one to tell him stories, stories as little bits of soul confetti that stick in random places, the curve of his elbow or the bottom of his shoe. I want to give him magic as something tangible he can carry into a world he will grow up to learn as fact.

Bug presses his face up against the window. He asks. 

How make snow, Mommy? This is what my son wants to know.

So… I show him how to write the letter of his first name in the pattern his breath fogs on the glass. In the curve of his tiny J, there is the swish-swish-swishing tail of a monster.

I will this simple picture to evaporate, slowly, slowly, slowly, slow.  

I tell my son a story about the way the snow falls.

This piece was inspired by one of the finest writers on the web.  Please go read this, her, now!