Julia Wendell

Nestled in my furred purse are a necklace, two rings, a bear's claw, a horse's tooth, dried roses, and a small stone with the words, Think Snow, etched into it, by a boy I once pretended to love. He chose me, and I went along with his choosing.

We were skiers, the scratched words a meaningful seduction for anyone craving descent.

I think of snow, long after the boy grown man died young, the stone still snug in its buck velvet, waiting to be carried up the hill from its sleeping place, this flake of shale, a talisman to winters.

If only the stone could be reunited with its mother outcrop and weather elements again, ferried molecule by molecule from the Monongahela and Mississippi to the tide-beating sea. With me it lives an eternity of expectation, a memento I sing of every decade or so, seeing Larry and his dreams of snow, shushing down the mountains—me, stem-christying behind at a girlfriend’s pace.

Nearly half a century later, he likely wouldn’t remember the gesture—the oubli that often happens to givers of gifts.

I still see him hunched over the object like an artist, or the old man he never became,

Nights in White Satin igniting his zeal, penny in hand for the etching, all it took to expose what he couldn’t know of life’s blizzard.