The Elegant Gathering of White Snows Read Online Free PDF

baby, please come out now and let your mama hold you in her arms,” I whispered to her softly. “Let me tell you what Richard is like, and what it will be like when springtime comes and we walk through the grass at the edge of the cornfields.”
    I must have talked liked this to her for hours. The talking helped me leave the pain and go to wherever it was I was talking about. I could actually see the tattered brown baby carriage and a sea of tiny green corn shoots poking through the rich, brown, muddy soil. I could bend down and smell spring in the grass and that musty cool smell that hangs across the yard each summer morning before the heat consumes everything.
    Chester told me later that the doctor came in several times to tell me to push and that if I didn't, the baby would never come out but I have never been able to remember that. I tell you I can remember that the old kitchen rags were on the line and that once I tipped the carriage toward the sun so my baby girl could feel it on her face, an then I sat down and rested my head against the side of the wicker carriage, so scratchy it reminded me of lying in the August hayfields.
    I pushed and I saw the top of the doctor's head disappear under the sheet across my legs as if he had been swallowed up into a deep and endless cave. I saw him next just as a series of contractions moved through my body like an ocean wave and I could feel the placenta push itself out.
    The time then stretched out until each second seemed like a minute and each minute an hour. When I had Richard, the doctor tossed him into the air and shouted, “Hey, Chester has a big boy!” and I waited for that or for anything but there was only silence.
    “Tell me, please tell me,” I finally asked, my voice sounding pathetic and frightened.
    This is when the nurse could have touched me or reached out her hand. I would have given me the baby no matter what was wrong, because that is all a mother wants, to touch and see her own baby.
    But everyone waited. Finally I sat up and screamed, “Damn it, show me my baby!”
    The doctor got up and gestured to the nurse and she quickly handed him a blanket. The doctor wrapped my baby girl up, and then came up beside me. This is when I shouted for the second time. “Show me the baby, now, just show me the baby.”
    The doctor's arms moved out, and I watched his mouth open and words came spilling out, but what he was saying did not register in my mind. I only wanted that baby in my arms. It was when she came to me then that I knew she was ill because her lips were the color of the blue summer sky and her ears as red as the sky in early winter when fall will not surrender. I took her to my breast and heard the doctor whisper, “It's a girl.” That second I named her Annie Marie because that is what we'd been calling our baby girl all these months. Annie Marie. Annie Marie.
    If my baby girl would have been born anytime but then, she would have lived and I would not be walking down this highway for hours and hours. They would have patched up that tiny hole in her heart, the hole that sucked out all the days and nights and years of life that she might have had. How many years now have I thought about that? Sweet Jesus, my life has passed and I have mourned a lifetime of might-have-beens. I have rocked in front of the window and thought about those hours when I felt her quiet heart thumping against the palm of my hand. There is no way to measure a loss like that. Not every human heart can understand what it is like, only another mother, another woman who needs to walk away from such grief and loss.
    After I had Annie in my arms, I asked the doctor to tell me about her condition. She had a hole in her heart, an opening that you could put your pinkie finger right inside of. I made him show it to me, and I could see right inside of my girl where she was pink and beautiful. That was all I could think, how beautiful she was on both sides.
    “How long?” I asked and I knew