Melancholy’s Great Staying Power

In the early years of our marriage, my new husband, my 12-year-old daughter, and I drove to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to a ski resort where the two of them would ski all day and I would drive around the small towns and state parks in a station wagon, stopping every so often to give myself another pregnancy test. I had a bunch of them in my bag and thought that, at any moment, my luck would turn.

I’ve written about this time, the alternate reality of it. My husband and daughter ending their day skiing with red faces and endless stories about their exploits and me telling them I saw a small herd of deer by a river where the road into the park stopped. To go further would mean getting stuck in foot-deep snow. Unnecessary, I thought, since I was already stuck. The last pregnancy test in a gas station outside a small town had been negative. I might have thrown the rest of the tests in the trash. I don’t remember. I never told them anything about my drives, only about the deer because they seemed so remarkable to me.

A few years later, we went back to the ski resort, this time with a newly adopted little boy and a Samoyed as big as a small house. I remember dressing the little boy, he was just about two, in snow pants, boots and an insulated vest. It was winter warm in the U.P. which means that the brightness of the sun and the reflection on the snow makes it seem warm even when it’s freezing. This is why people cross-country ski up there in a t-shirt and a stocking cap. Anyway, my boy and me and my big dog, well, we spent the days outside in the snow and then inside napping and when my husband and daughter came back, all was well.

I don’t know why I write about this. My daughter, now married with three kids, is skiing out West. Her husband posts videos of her slaloming down huge mountains and she looks like a painting come to life, she is that graceful and her skiing that effortless. Her father taught her to ski and, for a while at least, her stepfather joined her. I had nothing to do with it. I was off in a blur of melancholy watching deer who looked at me for just seconds before going back to their work finding leaves under the snow.

I can conjure up that scene and the melancholy of it even now forty years later. That’s how long some things stick with a person.