A Colder than Normal Winter

I never know what will spark my imagination. Many years ago, while driving through Arkansas on a cold icy day, I saw a young boy trudge over a fallow field, heading toward a shack with a single, lighted window cutting through the approaching dusk. He carried a small paper sack in his right hand. The scene reminded me of an Emil Nolde landscape, intense and emotional, or the feeling I experienced when I first saw Andrew Wyath's Christina's World. This is what came out of what I witnessed that day. I tried to capture the fear and guilt I felt when my father died of cancer. I was about that boy's age.

A Colder than Normal Winter

The dying sun dangles like an orange sore, scabrous and purulent. Dark clouds, pregnant with the threat of a winter storm, roil over the northern horizon like a disease, slowly devouring the sun’s feeble light and the icy blue sky.

The dark shadow of a boy, carrying a small sack filled with medicine for his father, crosses a fallow field. His breath pulses from him in small white storm clouds. The cold stabs through him, and his legs, like bellows, stoke the fires in his chest, but he feels none of that. The fear in his mind numbs him, binds him to the shack across the field where he knows his father, the certainty of death slowly working its way through his emaciated body, stares through a frosted window and waits for him.

The boy throws himself upon the barren ground—tries to erase the image of the cancer eating his father’s insides like white-hot flames devouring paper. He knows that death is an awful process that does not discriminate between good and evil, but he cannot imagine life without his father. Even the thought of his expiration creates a chasm of loss and yearning in his chest.

He has seen him cough, bring up blood, red and hot enough to melt ice. He rises and trudges home toward the lighted window that holds his father’s wasted shadow and new responsibilities, the fear of failing him during his last few days, heavy on his shoulders.

How does one change the weather, disperse the clouds building behind him that promise more icy winds and a colder than normal winter?