Winter. I only have to hear the radiators throbbing with the warmth of sobs trapped inside them, behind their white-flowered paint patterns that leave red marks on my hands, and then I know it is winter. I only have to brush my teeth while listening to wind-whistle rattling the windows, and feel the grind of the snowplows, seldom seen, crunching wintery darkness. They leave the snow in grimy heaps by the roadside in the very back of our backyard. My brother, if he is in the mood for it, will drag out our trashy sleds and have us an afternoon on a sledding hill. The salt on the porch steps in the morning glitters in the sun. Every rooftop in our tiny bump-in-the-road town glitters with snow. I can’t peel my face away from the windows when it’s snowing. I will the snow to fall, fall, fall, never minding my parents’ groans and complains about the terrible roads. I hope it never ends; I pray to Jesus it keeps snowing and snowing and snowing. When the snow begins to crack and melt and drip, I can’t bear to look out the windows at the tired wetness being slowly destroyed in the resignation that spring brings. I want to build a castle of snow and ice in my backyard. I make little popsicle stick sleds for my wooden dolls, wrap them up in the winter clothes I hand-sewed for them, and tumble them down the sledding hill. Sometimes, I’m lying under the winter sky in a field nobody knows about. My eyes are so cold, my feet are so cold, my face is so cold, I feel raw and red and snotty, but I’m grinning up at the sky, grinning up at its still and placid frozen blueness, with the sun shining firm and clear like a single piano note. The winter sky is a middle C. I’m a snow angel in a white sky, and the blueness above me is the sea where I am falling backwards. I stay and stay in a blue and white world till my heart is a note played against the sky of my own self. When I stumble home and shake the snow from my little boots, my mother has got me a cup of Swiss Miss, and the radiator stings my hands as every nerve of me pricks like evergreen leaves.

Everything steams in winter: the backs of cars, the smoke from chimneys on chilly rooftops, people’s mouths when they talk in the cold. The whole world steams and steams and steams.

 I can feel ice inside me, an ice sculpture of something that will never melt. It comes to me at night, on a deep howling winter night. It comes to me when I’m in the car on a long road trip, when my mother hits an icy patch in the road, and she screams for an eternal second as she loses control. It comes to me when my daddy slides off the road into a ditch, snow slumps against the windshield of the car, the tow truck comes slow, and the snow keeps falling like the whirling in the stamen of a lethal black flower. It comes to me when I have to walk inside the store to call someone to rescue us from our broken car, my mother and brother beside me, and every blast blows inside the cracks of my cells.

Sometimes winter goes on forever, and then I change my mind; I beg God to make it warm again. If it is warm again, the people who have been away will come back. I bury my face in my arms, bury myself under a cave of blankets Duct-taped to my bedroom wall. Sometimes the cold never ends. But then again, that’s how it’s always got to be with life. You pass over the bleak and silent and endless snowy fields, and you feel like you’ve run a thousand miles. Day is over so soon. You sink into the radiator, a white pipe-cleaner clutched in your fingers. The deep sing-song of the radiator is also mixed with the clanging sound of junk thrown between the radiator and the wall and stuck there.

Spring. I only have to bury my face in a yellow tulip and feel the perfect stem break beneath my fingers. Suddenly, there is nothing to fear from the air. The playground slides and swings come back to life and I am moving up and down once more. Down by the river, the feathery balls of baby geese waddle-walk-waddle-walk beside their mamas and daddies. I pick up a feather, brush it to my cheek. My own mama and daddy don’t understand why human kids can’t be as obedient as geese. The otters swim as fluidly as leaves that drift down the river. Their dazzling, shimmering fur glides by on the blanket of the river’s changing colors. Every spring stream, pond, river, and puddle is a pool of endless color. Each whitened dandelion is a planet holding together by seeds and broken by breath.

Springtime, I feel caught in the earth’s turning. A tornado watch turns to a tornado warning. An idea’s seed becomes the birth of a tree. Inside me. Sometimes. There’s a light at my window, and the earth wears a dress of birdcall. As I am working puzzles on the floor, I hear voices beneath me, changing me, like the colors on a river sweeping me along. My parents talk about the new house, the big backyard, the small safeness. How they can picture their children playing on the front lawn. Four bedrooms and one bathroom, they say. Does it have a pink room? Does it have a window seat? I ask. If I stay where I am, I will get a new, raw Easter egg smashed flat in my face. The big weedy leaves will come up to hide us like many green umbrellas. We are afraid of the eyes in the leaves, watching us.

Find the edge pieces first. My parents walk and walk and walk. Somewhere in the world, there’s a restaurant opening and closing, opening and closing, over and over again. The buildings shut down and open and maybe this spring they won’t be back. People pack up and leave their trash by the roadside. My brother’s grilled cheese sandwich is a squishy yellow color like the sun in my eyes.

Summer. The heat of hell has descended upon us. I lie on my bedroom floor when I’m not at vacation Bible school, and I listen to the air conditioner gurgle and roar, my book of Summer Fun Activities open before me. But I am not having fun this summer. I pick dried glue from my kneecaps and pick raw skin from my lips, feet, fingers. Play with a doll, make a recipe, read a book, do a craft, my mother says, and if I’m bored, she’ll threaten me with some dreadful chore. One brother is out picking up scrap metal. When he’s here, I hear his music blaring straight through me, music like Fall Out Boy’s “Centuries.”

I can’t go to the swimming pool, so I make the worst alternatives ever with the hose in the backyard. I drape the hose over the bike-rack and run through the mud, singing, “Into the mists of a morning sunrise!” The water makes rainbows in the mist. It’s cold and nasty, and my bathing suit clings wetly to me all day. The only good feeling is when I have to pee later and it feels nice and warm because I got myself so cold. Sometimes I throw down a plastic tarp to keep the hose from wrecking the grass and make a “slip and slide” using a small hill in the backyard. The muddy plastic lies around all year and gets in people’s way. Everyone passing by on the road can see me half-naked like a banshee in the backyard. By far, my worst escape involves filling a plastic tote bucket with hose water and sitting in it like it’s a wading pool. I’m doing this while waiting for the DCFS folks to visit my family. The mean DCFS folks can’t see me playing in a tote bucket or they’ll snatch me away to some grimy foster home, God knows where, and I’ll have to cry over stuffed animals kind people give me because I’m a poor little orphan forced from her home by the mean DCFS folks poking their nose into my brother’s bruises at his school. They might make me take all my clothes off to see if I got hurt where nobody can see. That’s what my mama says. So I have to be on my best behavior and not tell the DCFS folks that I helped cleaned up the house.

When I get done with my hose water bath, I shiver with a chill the rest of the day. I sit in the hallway while my brother’s in his room, and we play a game called I’m Going to Hit You So Hard. We say things like, “I’m going to hit you so hard that your brains will turn to Jell-O,” “I’m going to hit you so hard that space aliens will come down from the sky to zap us all,” and “I’m going to hit you so hard that Mom will fly to outer space.” We try to see who can say the sillier thing about hitting each other so hard. But Mom doesn’t like us talking that way. Not with the DCFS folks sniffing around. I hide in the closet when they’re talking to my parents. When they talk to me they don’t seem too interested in me, but I’m good and scared and keeping my fingers crossed just the same. That was sure a close call. Looks like I won’t be an orphan after all. But the social worker is always poking around also, when I’m sitting around looking at tattered women’s magazines by the exercise bike. The summer is full of psychiatrist appointments and psych ward visits and police calls.

All I can think about is getting double digits in my age. Sometimes it’s more panic than wonder that I got to be this old. When I am alone, I listen to the ten-year-old heart beating inside me. I hope people will remember me when I am dead by the little papers I’m leaving around the house and inside books. Maybe they’ll talk about what a good little kid that ten-year-old was back then. Maybe I’ll have to bury something in the backyard for them to remember me by. The only interesting thing we ever found in the backyard in summer was some rubbery frog that exploded. Backyards never have treasure in them like they do in storybooks. Sometimes I get bored digging up my backyard. Then I get to plastering purple-and-white Duct tape on my trashy scooter to make the prettiest scooter in the world.

My birthday party is over. Nobody invites me over to play in their sprinkler like they promised. It would sure be nice to not have the doors to everything around the house locked, locked, locked. I’ve got to bang on everything. Bang, bang, bang. My brother is eyeing the keys like he’s going to figure out how to unlock the doors. He learned how to run this summer. He’s fourteen years old and not normal at all.

It’s not bad to be stuck in the house, after all. The paper doll worlds go on and on and on.

But later on, some summer, I’ll be sucking on my fingernail clippings or picking at my skin as usual, and some song I heard for the first time this summer will come back to me. Songs from my past summers come back to me, with a sudden wind of memory borne on the air conditioner wind that roars in the now-empty upstairs of my house. The songs are the nearest thing to a time capsule I’ve ever had. My memory picks up every scrap and holds it close in a place where not one part is lost. I can relive every single sensation, every smell, every taste—just with the sound of a song in my ear!

            Memories wrap themselves around a song, like a cyclone of leaves whirling in the sky. The memories are like random magazine and newspaper clippings, a collage without meaning or purpose or order. They swim deep in my consciousness, and the cold water of memory soaks me to my skin till I’m chilled. I am rocked to sleep in summer on my memory. I can never, ever describe this feeling. All I can say is that I long to be replaced by my past.

Autumn. Winter coats come out again. We find what we left behind us in our pockets from last spring. The past is very far away.

Stuck inside again, I tuck my knees inside my nightgown at night, watching the world go by. The leaves get tired until they reach the ground, but some reach the sky. The leaf fires go up and up and up like the earth breathing out incense. All the sidewalks smoke with the embers of blackening leaves. My mom tells me to supervise a dying leaf fire at dusk. Sometimes the leaves flame up, but gradually in the night they give up their spirit.

For a moment, I am pure reverie in the carelessly fallen yellow leaves. What do you know? The sun is falling slow into this orbit of earth that will never happen again. The blackbirds catch the sun on their winds, and at night, when the dying flakes of leaf fires blow past my face, they are calling out and calling out. They catch the autumn sun on their wings as they are crying out.

It is not quite real and not quite make-believe, this life I live. I am laughing, jumping in puddles, as I leave my brother behind for what will amount to separation for the rest of our childhoods—maybe even for the rest of our lives. We won’t be able to live together in the same house again. He wrestled too much wind as he ran away. He thirsted for this day in fall. I often worry about him, though. I worry about him running forever across a world without danger or roads or boundaries. He is not quite real, this brother who has been away. He’s a laughing, sighing old song in my ears. I seldom hear this song. The home where he lives gradually loses all his toys and books, and then he’s just his plain old self with no accessories. We still try to fill his frozen life with thought and memory and song.

“Remember?” we ask him. “Remember?” I don’t cry for him except after our first visit. He is becoming make-believe. And I am not found in his eyes. The thirsty puddles freeze, and the Christmas decorations come up. All I can think about is putting Christmas ornaments on the tree.