Separation

There is a dead snake on the cracked road. My son says it’s not a dead snake. He says the snake has just shed its skin and left it there. I say OK because I can’t manage a fight, but I can see the snake’s flat eyes, its tire-smushed flesh, corporeal. This morning I wake early to a triumphant sunrise between the trees and pour out yesterday’s coffee while surveying the detritus of the evening before. Lights still on, front door unlocked, I fell asleep coiled with my children, who are now padding down the stairs. I grab an apple from the fridge, the door broken from when their father slammed it (you have to fit the two sides together like Legos). I slice the apple, half for their breakfast, half sprinkled with lemon for their lunch; I allow myself a single piece. My son forgets to grab his backpack as he heads for the bus (is it forgetting if he never remembers?), and I hoist it on my own shoulder because I can’t manage a fight. Outside, the oversize garden, blanketed with leaves, wraps around the house like a noose. What will I be without my children? My daughter is afraid of heart attacks, but she’s more afraid of crying at school. As a girl I stood bare shouldered in a cold lobby as my mother signed a deposit slip and handed it to the teller, and I felt the crush of adulthood encroaching. In the absence of a teacher to show me how to be, I look to the tree outside my bedroom window, the one that drops its leaves upon my garden, and I think how its thin, knotted branches, forking from one commanding trunk, manage to survive the winter winds. I look to the cherry blossoms that endure fifty-one weeks of being forgotten, and to the daffodils, a few blinks ago bulbs in their underground clutches, waiting, and now, newly sprung, still waiting.