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That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do “dead men’s fingers” call them.
There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like a while they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
—Act IV, Scene VII
Three years later…
Willow
I woke up to a sticky Indiana summer morning, the heat laying on me like a second, damp blanket. Air conditioning was on the long list of household improvements to my rental in The Cottages. I’d only been back in Harmony for three months, and food and rent ate up most of my little salary from the HCT. I didn’t have much left over for home renovations.
I kicked the covers off to get some air on my skin. My bed was the same four-poster
queen-size from my parents’ house in Emerson Hills. It had moved with me to Canada, to Billings, Montana, and then to Austin, Texas. Three times in three years my dad was relocated, chasing the oil profits. My mother finally gave up packing and hauling furniture and insisted on pre-furnished homes with every move. It was wasteful and silly, but it was her way of protesting being dragged around North America.
I didn’t protest. I had no voice. No money. Nothing. The only thing I asked was to take my bed, including the sheets and blankets. If I pressed my nose to the linens and inhaled, I imagined I could still smell Isaac there—gasoline and smoke, peppermint and aftershave.
“Isaac.”
I let his name sigh out of me as I lay on the bed in my cottage, my hand pressing over my heart. No matter how often I thought of him—and it was constant—the ache in my chest never diminished. Missing him never got easier.
I shook off the sadness before it weighed me down, and got out of bed. I padded across the hardwood floors, through the living area, decorated with my own little touches. Wooden comedy and tragedy masks I found at a swap meet in Texas. A colorful Cheyenne throw rug I’d bought in Montana, soft under my feet as I crossed into the kitchen.
I started the coffee and my gaze lingered on the framed poem hanging next to the kitchen window. Angie wrote it for me in Mr. Paulson’s English class in high school. She sent it to me in Canada, before she left for Stanford.
Willow Tree
Its limbs the long hair
