An excerpt from my next book I Left It on the Mountain. This is how the chapter The Dogged ends. In this last section of that chapter I write about my first two small dogs, Chico and Coco, who were the Chihuahua childhood precursors of Archie and Teddy. And I also write about the first time my Mississippi family experienced a snowfall. The excerpt: That winter Chico and Coco joined our family I fretted about their shivering out in their three-sided dog house. As the winter settled in further, I had also nightmares about their freezing to death in the garage where my mother suggested they take up refuge as the temperature dropped. As February rolled around, the forecast for the first time in my childhood predicted we’d have a snowstorm in Mississippi. My brother and sister became little lookouts at the living room window watching the sky for any sign of a snow flake. My mother stocked the pantry with cans of soup and extra loafs of bread and jars of peanut butter and jelly. My father brought home some long pairs of newly laundered athletic socks from the gym for us to use as scarves about our little necks, our mother shaking her head at his ingenuity but thankful too she’d not have to go into her grocery budget to buy us any extra clothing for the frigid weather that had already descended so oddly upon us. I was the only one didn’t seem to be excited by the prospect of such unusual weather in our midst or the expectation of making our first family snow man or falling down on the newly whitened lawn to make something my mother called snow angels, pointing to a picture in her Redbook magazine that month of a mother and a child making them in the snow in some faraway enchanted place called Cape Cod when she was trying to take my mind off Chico and Coco outside. But I would not let up about them. I kept begging her to allow me bring them inside in case they froze to death outside. Finally, I began to cry uncontrollably when none of my arguments were working with her. My father came to my rescue and picked me up. “What have you done to him?” he wanted to know. “Leave him alone,” he told her. “Oh, don’t start with me,” she said. “You two. You’re ganging up on me. I know what you’re doing.” “It’s starting!” came my little brother’s voice in the other room. “The snow! We see snow! Look! Mommy! Daddy! Look!” My father put me down and I, drying my eyes, followed my mother and father to the window where my brother and sister were standing. We all stood there amazed as we watched the stormy swirl of flakes fall onto the frozen ground. I left them standing there in their amazement and, wrapping a long athletic sock around my neck, walked out in the storm to check on Chico and Coco in the garage. My father followed me. “They’re going to be fine, Kevinator,” he said, bending down to tighten the sock around my neck. “You can’t stay out here without a coat on though.” “They don’t have coats,” I told him. “They have built-in coats. Their fur will keep them warm.” “But they’re shaking, Daddy,” I said, shaking now myself. My mother joined us in the garage. Outside Kim and Karole were running around with their faces turned toward the falling snow and trying to catch it in their mouths. “Mama, please,” I pleaded. “Can’t we put them in the kitchen for just tonight until the snow storm is over?” “Nan ...” said my father. “Oh, okay. You two win. But just this one night. And then we’ll talk about it again tomorrow. Only in the kitchen though. There’s a box under the sink. Get that and put those nasty sweatpants in it and put them in that.” I picked up Chico and my father, winking at me, took Coco. He put his other arm around my mother and gave her a kiss. She shrugged it off and scurried out into the yard to play in the snow with Kim and Karole. Once my father and I placed the dogs down into the box in the kitchen I ran back out into the garage to get the sweatpants and brought them back inside to cushion the bottom of the box. My father put a bowl of food and a bowl of water down inside it. “Kevin!” my mother called. “Come play!” I ignored her call and stayed inside the kitchen. I looked up past the silent radio on the window sill and saw the snow swirling about outside. “Howard!” called my mother. “It’s fun. Come outside!” My father gave my head a pat and did as he was told. I sat silently with Chico and Coco. Free of them , I listened to my family frolic in the snow outside, merry, muffled, and free of me. ############# That night I realized how silent snow can make the world in which it falls. No cars passed by on the street outside my bedroom window. No one walked along the sidewalk. Sound itself seemed to have come to a standstill. It was so quiet I could not sleep worrying that either Chico or Coco, if they barked to complain about their strange new surroundings in the kitchen, would break the night’s eery silence and be exiled by my mother once more out to the frigid garage. I got out of bed and tip-toed into the kitchen to check on them. Coco was asleep but Chico, the more fragile of the two, was shivering in the box. The long athletic socks my brother, sister and I had used that day as scarves were on the kitchen counter. I retrieved them and stuffed them down around Chico in the box, which awakened Coco who began to bark. I could not quiet her and my groggy father came into the kitchen. He looked like he was prepared to bark himself at all three of us there on the floor but then he softened. “Come on, Kevinator, let’s get back to bed.” “Can I bring Coco and Chico with me?” I asked. “Now, Kevin...” “Please, Daddy. They’re so cold. I can keep them warm.” Too sleepy to argue, he picked the dogs up and told me to come along. “Sshshshsh,” he warned us and led us back to my bed and began to tuck us in. He looked down at Chico and Coco so comfortably curled up next to me. He sighed. “Oh, hell, move over,” he said, surprising me by climbing into my bed himself for the very first time. He lay behind me and pulled me up close to him beneath the covers, his head next to mine on the pillow, the rough stubble of his face no longer splinter-like but something more splendid that I had yet to have a name for. He wrapped an arm over me and then over Coco and Chico. I watched his big hand - could it really be the same hand that I had watched so often palm a basketball back in the gym where he coached his team or grab the black belt before it spanked me or even once slap my mother in my presence - now gently hold one of Coco’s paws and one of Chico’s in its palm and then carefully, oh so carefully, enclose them there. I looked up and saw, in the doorway, my mother taking in the tableau of her husband and her child in the bed with two curled up Chihuahuas. She wore a woolen white robe. Her blonde hair was mussed but magnificently lit by the snowy light that snaked across my bedroom floor and up one of her legs, snaring her whole lovely body before further whitening her face and finally forming a kind of halo that hugged those mussy curls. She moved a hand toward her hair and I knew in that moment she was real and not the apparition she seemed to be and, indeed, would become in two years once her cancer had killed her and carved this very image into my memory for the rest of my life, my mother’s ghost-like presence suddenly spun from the first light I’d ever seen reflected from a snowfall. My father let go of Chico’s and Coco’s paws and motioned for her to join us but she did not take his cue. She turned instead to go back to their bedroom. Then, lifting her hand this time to her cheek, she kept it there. She hesitated. She pivoted back our way and I saw something flutter across her face - resignation? reality? love? - along with the light that seemed again to float silently about the room until it chose that cheek of hers on which to perch. She walked into the light toward us, wafting it about once more with the sway of her hips, and found a way to come between my father and me, slipping her body like a sliver of the snowy light itself into the bed. My father then lay his arm over both of us, my mother and me, his hand lying flat against the bed. I took a paw from Chico and one from Coco and placed them again into his open palm. He enclosed them, this time including my own hand in his gentle clench. My back was against my mother whose back was against my father’s. I moved closer to her, then she to him. I heard my father growl and kiss her on her neck. She sighed. She touched my arm. I finally fell asleep in a world that was no longer silent.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 18:14:58 +0000
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