A woman I saw on the street

You could still tell her frame was small, even though she wore a long, heavy woolen coat. She was about five feet and five inches, and had short, white, hair that looked like the cotton you pull from the head of a q-tip. Upon that hair was a knitted hat, probably acrylic wool. It was a reddish-orange color and was knitted with the moss stitch, so that little baubles of yarn covered the entire surface. And, there was a scarf made from matching yarn tied around her neck so that it hung down the front of her chest. Both were slightly pilled, well worn. Her coat was heavy, and fell at the middle of her skinny calves. She had varicose veins that crawled up her legs and that were buried beneath her white socks that only rose past her ankles, so that a slice of her papery skin was exposed to the cold air. On her feet were white, New Balance tennis shoes that were fairly clean, and looked slightly out of place next to her long black coat. The woman walked with haste uphill, shoulders broad, head bowed, eyes pinched, against the wind. In her right arm swung a new, brown leather briefcase.

She loved the cold.

The First eighteen years of her life were spent in hot, stuffy rooms, where she was ignored by her parents.

It wasn’t her sister’s fault, though. She couldn’t help the seizures, the muscle tightness, the drooling.

But her parents’ obliviousness to their youngest daughter was as suffocating as the 78 degrees and the humming of the humidifiers that was necessary to keep her sister alive.

She died, anyway.

But that was 44 years ago. Since then, she has yearned for the cold. 42 years ago, in a big city in northern Canada where the temperatures never rose above 54 degrees, she found a job as a receptionist in a family planning facility. In that same town she met her husband, and they were married the following January. Then in March, 41 years ago, as they drove through Bismarck, North, Dakota, their identical twins were conceived in their car with the broken heater, the leather seats cracked from the cold, windows coated with frost. The following December in Wisconsin brought ice, snow, and two sons.

While she still was warm to her sons, her husband, the women she met at her the family planning clinic she supervised, her two poodles and calico cat, her relationship with her parents held a thick, solid sheet of ice. The last time she visited them in Texas was 24 years ago, when her dad had his hip replaced. The last time they visited was at her sons’ high school graduation 23 years ago.