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When the weather turns cold…

“That’s what love does.” — Britney King, The Things We Say In Silence 

I was sixteen months old, hardly old enough to remember being hurriedly uprooted from my warm bed that cold winters night. You were coming and it was time to go. I don’t know if I knew what was about to happen. How could I? Later, when they took me to the hospital to meet you I would shake the bassinet you slept in. Violently. Maybe I wanted you to get up and play. Maybe I wanted you to show me what made you so special. Maybe it was my way of saying you were going to irrevocably change my life and I was quite fine with the way things were before that night, before the weather turned cold.

Fast forward ten years, I liked you a lot better then. We were jumping off shelves onto a bed and always one to outdo you, I climbed higher. I remember the look on your face. Is she really going to do it? Of course, I was. I jumped and landed wrong, fracturing my wrist. It was just a hairline fracture, nothing major. But it hurt. You kept jumping. Get up you said, let’s play. Show me what you can do. Now when the weather turns cold, my wrist lets me know. It’s nothing major, nothing I can’t manage. Just a twinge of something. But it’s there nonetheless, and in a sense so are you. Memories embedded deep. What a thing it is to get to witness a life coming and going, I’ll think. And later, when my husband brings my wrist to his mouth and kisses it, I will smile. He won’t know, and I won’t say, but that’s what love does. It shows up when you least expect it and sticks around when the weather turns cold.

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