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way ahead and waiting. It’s funny how quickly I adapted that summer. How easily I slid into the flow of things, like stepping into a river and letting myself be carried away. I learned the customs instantly, the job in a single day. I envied the other girls for their quick opinions, long nails, and loud laughter that turned heads. I suppose I always stood out though – my straight hair that wasn’t blonde, eyebrows that weren’t plucked too thin and with a way of listening hard that made people tell me things, even when I had nothing to say in return. But now I am glad for that.
    I do a lot of thinking these days, when I’m not busy with everything else. It is the island I think of most; sometimes my hands feel tired and bloody from battering on the door of the past, begging to be let back in.
    After all these years I still have my tea in the same mug, washing it after every use by hand. With a small black picture of a birch bark canoe, the elaborate cursive script of
The Tippecanoe
is still visible, perhaps only because I know where it is. I pour half a cup of boiling water over the teabag and poke it about with a spoon, the scent of bergamot rising as the water turns black, bitter. Steam from the kettle clouds the kitchen window white and wet.
    Outside the oak leaves have turned brown but have not fallen. The yellowing grass is not quite dead. St. Paul in thefall. Hunting season is just beginning: bear, snipe, trout, deer. Crossbow hunting only, for the adult bucks. Not that I’ve ever gone near a rifle, but I know enough to make small talk with the neighbors when I’m forced to. Althea next door is ninety-six and owns a lever-action Marlin 336 SS. ‘The components are stainless steel so it’ll survive anything,’ she explained of her fifty-year-old deer rifle. ‘Now pretend that pumpkin is someone’s head,’ she told me, pointing into her backyard and hoisting the gun up to her shoulder. Two days later I was still scraping pumpkin guts from the siding of my house. Althea keeps the rifle loaded under her bed in case a foul-weather hunter decides to become an opportunist. I go over sometimes to help her read her mail.
    These last fifteen years hunters have become a common sight in our neighborhood backyards, out for deer or raccoons when the city is shut down. I keep my pantry stocked and my head down. I’m too old to play with guns.
    Having nothing else to do, I begin worrying briefly about the weather predicted for this evening, the hurricane of snow bright red on the digital radar, descending south from Alberta in the mad mix of hail, rain, high winds, and huge drifts of snow we have come to expect.
    Worry gives a small thing a big shadow, my mother would say in her odd, cheerful wisdom. In her day she would have been right. But the storm is two hundred miles across, fully equipped with its own shadow. A 6.5 capable of darkening two states at a time.
    Taking a bottle from under the sink I fill the Tippecanoe cup to the top. Even if the storm descends, the new armored city snowplows will be out along with the high-capacity salt trucks and national guard weather vehicles; I decide it will probably miss St. Paul altogether. It must. When it does, I will indulge myself – wondering thoughtfully if my owndetermination to
believe
can alter an omnipotent predetermined outcome. This morning it’s still about ten degrees, and almost sunny.
    Anna appears in the kitchen with a denim jacket over her sweatshirt, dark hair in a bun, huge purse bulging with items gleaned from our morning’s work. It seems like we have been clearing for weeks – sorting, throwing everything away.
    â€˜I’m off. Be safe tonight, Mom.’
    â€˜Is that a new purse?’ I ask.
    She checks the thermostat, then lines up my afternoon pills on the kitchen counter.
    â€˜It
is
new,’ I say. ‘It’s a
leather
purse.’ I make a mooing sound and she rolls her