The Ice Queen

I

We knew it was getting closer because my brother was dreaming of butterflies. Even in the daytime, he was dreaming. At first the mete­orology society had refused to accept his paper, “Chaos Theory and Fairy Tales.” I had to stay with Ned overnight while Nina flew up to speak to the head of the society. When she came back she reported that the decision had been changed.

By the time Ned went to Washington DC to deliver his paper, he was in a wheelchair; the moderator had to lower the microphone and ask for com­plete silence so that Ned’s reedy voice could be heard. At the heart of his paper was the notion that fairy tales relieved us of our need for order and allowed us impossible, irrational desires. Magic was real, that was his thesis. This thesis was at the very center of chaos theory — if the tiniest of actions re­verberated throughout the universe in invisible and unex­pected ways, changing the weather and the climate, then anything was possible. The girl who sleeps for a hundred years does so because of a single choice to thread a needle. The golden ball that falls down the well rattles the world, changing everything. The bird that drops a feather, the but­terfly that moves its wings, all of it drifts across the universe, through the woods, to the other side of the mountain. The dust you breathe in was once breathed out. The person you are, the weather around you, all of it a spell you can’t under­stand or explain.

He got a standing ovation, Nina told me. We were setting up the nursery together now that they were back from DC, painting a watercolor mural on the wall. Nina was supposed to take it easy — she had preeclampsia, high blood pressure brought on by pregnancy — but she painted flowers and trees in the baby’s room after she came home from classes. Sometimes Ned would watch us, and then we’d turn around, ready to joke with him, and he’d be asleep. We kept paint­ing. Nina was at work on the sun. My job was the moon.

Sometimes my brother cried out in his sleep, sometimes he called out.

“Butterflies,” Nina said. “In his dreams.”

Nina had dark circles under her eyes. Now, when my brother went to all his medical appointments, they let him have whatever he needed to kill the pain. That should be a good thing, but it’s not, because then you know you’re near­ing the end.

I offered to help out full-time, and Nina let me. They had closed the library, just as Frances had suspected. I had no job and was collecting unemployment benefits. I didn’t think about what I would do when my money ran out. I could al­ways get a job as a cashier at Acres’ Hardware. People would still ask me questions there. Reference me a saw, a hammer, a can of paint, an apron, an anvil. I would learn it all, recite it by heart.

But for now, I was available. I did the food shopping and the laundry. I felt useful for once. I began to paint butterflies on the wall. I began to dream of them, too. I thought of Laza­rus, surely halfway across the world by now. I dreamed of him as well, but only occasionally. I was too busy for that now.

My brother had started to age, the way ill people do. He was a hundred years old when he slept in his wheelchair; he was breaking our hearts. When he napped, Nina and I sat out on the grass, even when it was hot. There was a hedge of boxwood. We sat in its shade. Nina cried; I watched her. Once, I went into the kitchen to fetch some ice water for Nina and found my brother at the window.

“Do you think we all have something we dream of doing?” my brother said. At that moment he was perfectly alert.

I sat down at the table. “Such as?”

“The thousands of monarch butterflies. In migration. The thousands of changes. All chaos. All one moment. That’s what I’ve always wanted to see. I want to see that.”

He sounded upset. I’d never heard my brother want something quite so deeply, so much. This was far beyond his desire to see the old man in Jacksonville. That was a lark; this was the heart of the matter. The end of his life.

We hadn’t heard, but Nina had come in, looking for me. She was still crying, but she looked like stone, the way she had when I spied her in the yard. There were bits of grass on her clothes. She smelled like boxwood and evergreen. She was stronger than you’d think. She simply didn’t give away who she was to just anyone. She probably started to plan it out then. When she heard his dream.

A nurse came in once a week while I went with Nina to her Lamaze classes at the health center at the university. The other women were younger, graduate students, wives of young professors, two lesbian couples. Everyone seemed so sure of the future. They had potluck dinners together on the weekends. We never went to those. Maybe everyone thought Nina and I were a couple. I suppose for those hours of class we were.

“She’s the best breather in the class,” I told Ned.

“Of course. Naturally.” He was proud of her. He was in love with her. But he was also in the process of leaving. He often sat at the window and stared at the yard and I wasn’t quite certain he was seeing what we were seeing.

I did get a card from Seth Jones. The postmark was Flo­rence, so he’d made it there. He wrote, Plan to take the ashes to Venice. Wish you were here. SJ.

I didn’t. I wanted to be exactly where I was, sitting with my brother in the afternoons, fixing dinner and washing up afterward, playing cards with Nina in the evenings. One day a package arrived for my brother; it was a bathrobe, sent by Jack Lyons.

“Who the hell is Jack Lyons?” Ned asked. He liked the bathrobe but felt odd accepting a gift from a stranger.

“You went to high school with him in Red Bank. And I used to sleep with him.”

“He has good taste,” Ned said.

“Shut up.”

“I meant in bathrobes.”

Jack knew what the dying needed. He was far more of an expert than I’d ever been. Even when I didn’t contact him, he continued to send my brother gifts. As for Ned, he’d started to wait for the packages. Look forward to them. One week there was a tape of birdcalls that my brother liked to have played while he napped. Another time there were two pairs of heavy woolen socks. And then came a huge box of fudge, the old-fashioned kind. My brother couldn’t eat it, but he loved the smell.

At last I called New Jersey. “You don’t have to send my brother anything,” I told Jack.

“I don’t need you to tell me what to do,” he said back.

There wasn’t much of an answer for that.

“He loves the birdsong tape. And the fudge.”

I was glad it was impossible for Jack to see me. I was in sweatpants and a T-shirt, Giselle curled on my lap. I had all the lights turned off to cut down on my electricity bills. I had recently applied for a job at Acres’ Hardware Store, only to be told I was unqualified.

I had my hand over the phone receiver. I was crying.

“I know what you’re doing,” Jack said.

“You’re such an expert.” I sounded snotty and bitter and desperate.

“About some things. Most people cry for good reason. Most people smile for good reasons, too.”

The next package he sent contained wind chimes. My brother had us put them up by the window. He smiled whenever he heard them. It was a gift for my brother, but it was also a message to me. There was something still worth having in his world.

“Did I know this guy Jack?” Ned asked. He was at the point of repeating all of our conversations. His memory was gone, and the here and now was going as well.

“No,” I said. “Nobody did.”

“He has good taste.”

“Seems to,” I had to agree.

At night, when Nina was exhausted, I sat with my brother and read him fairy tales.

“Read the one I like,” he said one night.

“It’s not in this collection,” I lied.

“Liar.”

But I would not read the story about death, not now, not when we knew what the ending was. I read “Hansel and Gretel” and “The Juniper Tree” and “Brother and Sister”; I read about fishermen’s wives and horses that were loyal, and then I told him the story I’d made up, about the frozen girl on the mountain.

“Now that’s a sad one,” my brother said. “All she has to do is pick up her feet and walk away and she won’t turn to ice. Even when we were kids and you told me, I never under­stood that girl.”

I wanted to change what was happening, but it couldn’t be done. I bit my tongue a thousand times a day. I wasn’t about to wish for anything. I was afraid of wishes still. But Nina wasn’t. She had gone to her doctor, who said she could no longer travel. My brother had made it to sixth months. He loved to put his hand on Nina and feel the baby moving. Nina didn’t tell me, but she bought the tickets for his dream. She started to teach me how to give Ned his injections of an­tibiotics and Demerol. She taught me how to work the IV when he needed more fluid.

“What’s the best way to die?” I asked Jack one night. I usually called him at work, but this time I’d phoned him at home. He still seemed surprised to hear from me, but he an­swered me right away.

“Living,” he said. He didn’t even have to think about it. It was as if he’d always known the answer.

When Nina told me she wanted me to take Ned to Cali­fornia most of what I felt was terror. Her doctor had told her she couldn’t make the trip because of her condition. But surely I wasn’t up to the task. I wasn’t up to anything. My brother was leaving so fast. He was in diapers now. He was going backward in time. Every time he woke up he talked about the butterflies. Once in his life, that’s what he wanted; well, this was that once. Nina had called a friend in Mon­terey who would pick us up at the airport in San Francisco; Eliza, a nurse, would come with a rented ambulance and take us to her house. The migration was already happening, she’d told Nina. Eliza’s husband, Carlos, would take us to Big Sur, where the monarchs spend the winter. We would get there by ambulance if necessary.

“It’s too much for him,” I said.

“It’s not enough,” Nina told me.

She had that stony look. She was the woman who’d been reading about the hundred ways to die. She wanted my brother to have everything he’d ever wanted.

I packed a bag that night. A carry-on, since the suitcase would be filled with medicine. Nina hired a medevac plane. She had already taken a second mortgage on the house. If she never had another car, if she and the baby had to walk everywhere, eat rice, read by candlelight, she still wanted this. Even if she couldn’t be there.

“You’re going to see the butterflies,” she said to my brother on the morning it was to happen.

“No.” He smiled at her. He didn’t believe it. He was still traveling backward through time. Younger than he had been on the night my mother died. I was the older sister now. I was the hand to hold.

“I can’t go, because of the baby, but your sister’s going to take you to California.”

“What do you know?” My brother closed his eyes, ex­hausted just thinking about it.

“I know I love you,” Nina said.

She was kneeling beside his bed. I had never witnessed such an act of generosity. Ned had on both pairs of socks Jack had sent. There were the wind chimes swinging back and forth in the window. I had been wrong about every­thing. I was terrified to go.

“Don’t worry,” Nina said. We had to take him to the air­port by ambulance — how could I not be worried? “You’ll manage.”

At least her friend Eliza was a nurse. I wouldn’t be all alone in this.

“Are you sure you want to go ahead? You probably won’t be with him when it happens.” When he goes, I meant to say. But I couldn’t.

Nina put her arms around me. She told me a secret. “I will be,” she said.

We gave my brother his maximum amount of Demerol and got on the plane. There were two EMTs with us, so I slept for a while. When I woke I felt weightless. There were clouds all around us. My brother was hooked up to an IV and the machine made a clicking noise. I realized the click­ing inside my head had disappeared some time ago and I hadn’t even noticed. I could see Ned’s feet, the socks Jack had sent him. I might have sobbed. One of the EMTs, a man about my age, sat down across from me and took my hand.

Over the Rockies, my brother was in pain. The sky was the brightest blue I’d ever seen, dotted with puffballs. I won­dered if this was what the sky was like in Italy. So blue. So open. We were floating through space and time. But I didn’t wish we would always be there. I knew this was only an in­stant. I gave Ned one of his injections, to make sure I was capable, with the experts looking on.

“There you go,” the EMT said. “Just like an old pro.”

I didn’t want to get to know him, or the other one, the young woman. I didn’t have any space for anything more than I was already carrying. I described the clouds to my brother.

“Cumulus,” he said. 200

His mouth was dry, so the woman EMT traveling with us gave him ice to suck on.

“Ice,” he said. “Very nice. Unless it’s on the porch.”

Ned and I laughed.

“Private joke,” I told the EMTs.

Ned was asleep when we landed at San Francisco. The am­bulance was parked on the runway and Nina’s friend Eliza was there. She and Nina had grown up next door to each other in Menlo Park, and she was Nina’s opposite, dark and jovial, even now when Ned cried in pain as he was being transferred.

“We’ll have him in a nice big bed soon,” Eliza reassured me. “We’ll take good care of you,” she told my brother.

Eliza telephoned Nina from the runway and then held the phone up to Ned’s ear. He smiled when he heard his wife’s voice. I don’t know what Nina said to him, but she comforted him somehow, and he slept all the way to Eliza’s house in Monterey, a long trip, so tiresome I fell asleep my­self, sitting up, my check against the window.

When I opened my eyes all I saw was green. And then the sky, and then the clouds.

“Almost there,” Eliza said cheerfully.

The ambulance pulled up in her driveway. I sat beside Ned while they got the stretcher ready. I could see Eliza’s husband come out to meet the EMTs. New ones now. The ones from the plane had disappeared.

“My fucking back,” Ned said. “It hurts.”

“Serves you right for being such a pain in the ass.”

A joke from a thousand years ago. He remembered.

“You’re the pain. You.” 201

***

I think Ned took the dishes off the table when he found them there that morning. I think he put them in the sink when he realized what it meant for our mother to have left breakfast for us. He did the logical thing in an illogical world. He cleaned up the mess.

I hopped out of the ambulance so Carlos and the EMTs could carry Ned inside. It was beautiful here, wherever we were. I blinked. A bat. There beyond the trees.

“Go to sleep,” Eliza told me. “We’ll wake you in a few hours, and then we’d better go right there.”

She was a nurse. She saw where my brother was. That he was leaving right now.

“I don’t need to sleep,” I said.

“An hour,” Eliza insisted. “Then we’ll be ready to go.”

They had a pullout couch made up for me. They were kind, and I accepted their kindness, even though I knew I’d never see them again, never be able to repay them.

When I woke up I could hear my brother and Eliza talk­ing. She asked him if he wanted food, applesauce, or home­made vanilla pudding, or crackers softened in water.

“Nope,” my brother said. “I couldn’t stomach it. That’s a joke. Get it?”

I heard Eliza’s laughter. I got up, found the bathroom, washed my face. Today was the day. It was the start of the ever after . I ran a stranger’s brush through my hair. It was longer than it had been since I was eight years old. Black. Sticks. Crow-colored. 202

I went into the guest room. My brother looked happy. He looked like a cloud.

“Guess where we are,” he said.

“The middle of your dream?”

“Monterey, California,” my brother said.

He was still here. Right here with me. And I was grateful for that.

Carlos and Eliza took him out to their van, and rested him in the back. An ambulance might not want to go as far into the forest as we meant to go. I got in the front seat while Eliza hooked up Ned’s IV and gave him all his meds. It was another ride, but it wouldn’t be as long. Carlos got behind the wheel. He worked for the parks de­partment.

“We try to keep this week secret,” he said. “So we don’t have tourists up the ying-yang. Plus we never know exactly. All fall they arrive in dribs and drabs and then all at once. They’re everywhere. That’s why it was all so spur-of-the-moment. But you made it in time, Ned,” he called to my brother.

It didn’t take that long to get there, but the road was curvy. It was the most beautiful place I had ever been. “Can you see out there?” I called to Ned.

Lying on his back, he could see the sky.

“Cirrus,” he called back.

His voice was a hundred years old. But he sounded happy. When I walked into the kitchen all those years ago, Ned was tossing something into the trash; he was piling the dishes into the sink. Our mother had left us two bowls of cereal, 203

two glasses of juice, our vitamin pills, the sugar bowl, two spoons, blueberry muffins, cut in half.

My eyes were filled with sleep when I walked into the kitchen that morning. My brother had looked guilty because he knew something I didn’t know. He looked ashamed, as though he had a secret that was too bad to share. It’s too early. Go back to bed.

Beautiful long, stretched-out clouds drifted all along the ocean. Big black rocks. The curving road. The smell of something. I stuck my head out the window, breathed deep. The here and the now of it blew me away. But I didn’t wish for anything. Not more. Not less. I was exactly where I was, head hanging out the window, feeling the wind, tears in my eyes. The scent of this place was amazing.

“Eucalyptus,” Carlos said. “It’s what attracts the butter­flies. The groves.”

I had no sense of what time it was. I think we had traveled through a day and a night. It was still morning, Eliza told me. I felt more for her than I had for people I’d known for years.

“He’s holding up,” she said, but the way she said it made me know, not for long.

We pulled into a parking lot. There was the Santa Lucia Range in front of us. And nearer, Mt. Lion. All rocks and trees. The ocean was so blue I couldn’t believe it. We were in a picnic area, but it was early and the lot was empty. Luck for once. Pure luck.

“We’ve got it all to ourselves,” Carlos said. “And a day without fog. That’s a miracle.”

The three of us got Ned onto the stretcher, into the fresh air. I carried the IV pole.

“Green,” Ned said.

It was. It was a eucalyptus grove. So delicious. Like the world was brand-new. We went up a path, slowly; pine needles make you slip, so carefully, carefully. The air was cold and warm at the same time — cool in the shadows, lemony in the sun. We crested a ridge. I thought there were falling leaves at first. All those orange things. Everywhere.

But no.

I leaned down and whispered to my brother, “You won’t believe this.”

We went into the sunlight and they were everywhere. In front of us were several picnic tables made of redwood, and we hauled the stretcher up on one. Settled it down, slowly.

“My, my, my,” my brother said.

There was a whirlwind of monarchs. You could hear the beating of their wings. I stood there with my arms out and they lit upon me, everywhere; they hung on my fingers, walked in my hair.

Carlos and Eliza were standing on a picnic bench, arms around each other.

“More,” they both said, and they laughed and drew each other near so that the butterflies swirled between them.

There were too many to count, everywhere, thousands of them, sleepy, slow, whirling. It was the height of their mi­gration, and they were exhausted and beautiful. So orange they were like rubies, red, red, red.

I borrowed Eliza’s cell phone. The service was bad, but when I put the phone up to my brother’s ear he could hear Nina. He knew it was her.

“Everything has just changed a thousand times over.”

It took all of his effort to say that. When he had, we turned off the phone and waited. I had the desperate urge to turn my brother around. Quick, I would say, we have to do it now. Put your feet where your head is resting. Play the final trick. Let Death pass over; let it pass by. Please, let us try. But I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything.

Eliza unhooked the IV right before it happened. There was a click, and then quiet. You wouldn’t think there could be so many butterflies in the world. You wouldn’t think every­thing could change in an instant. But there are, and it does.

There were whirling clouds above us, brought in from the cold ocean air. Nimbus. Fast moving. Flying. Good to lift your spirit. Good for everything. Good for him.

II

N ina named their daughter Mariposa. She was born in January on a day when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I noticed. I was keeping track of such things. I was there with Mariposa when she was born; I was the coach who said, Breathe and Push and Oh my God, there has never been any­thing so beautiful . I was watching over her from the begin­ning, so I was made her godmother, which meant I had to watch over her forever more. It turned out to be something I was good at. Something I was meant to be. I stayed on for several months, babysitting, helping out, nearly learning to cook, until Nina was ready to go back to work, ready to have her daughter go to the day care center at the university while she taught her classes. I left Giselle with them. It just made sense. She was a Florida cat now. She’d have howled if she’d been made to put a paw into snow and ice. Besides, I’d never thought she was mine, so I wasn’t really giving anything away.

A godmother’s role is to send gifts, and I do that — too much, probably. Every year on Mariposa’s birthday, I go for a visit. I don’t despair over that time of the year anymore. It’s my favorite month, just as it used to be. I’ve given Mariposa a dozen volumes of fairy tales. Her favorites are the Andrew Lang books, with all those pretty covers, filled with stories that feel illogical and true at the very same time. She and I are both partial to the Red Book.

Once I read Mari her father’s favorite, “Godfather Death.” “That’s not funny,” she said to me.

“No, it’s not,” I agreed. “But your father liked that story. He was a scientist like the doctor.”

“They don’t all have to be funny,” she said after thinking it over. “But tell me the one about a girl who climbs a moun­tain that no one has ever climbed before.”

“I don’t know that one. I only know the one about the girl who was turned into ice.”

“Make it up.” Mariposa had a solemn face that reminded me of Ned. Ned, who was a good secret-keeper. Ned, who never believed in perfect logic. Ned, in the ever after .

It was difficult for me to say no to Mariposa. I wanted her to have everything. So I made up the story for her. It turned out to be a good one. Better than the story I used to tell my­self. It was the same girl, in the same icy land, but this time she thought to climb over the mountain instead of standing in place and freezing. She was smarter now, less likely to give in. As soon as she got to the place on the other side of the mountain, she started to melt; she left a blue river behind her, one that is always cold, always pure, always true.

The last time I visited Orlon, I took Mariposa out to the orange grove. I was babysitting. Nina was at class, and Mariposa had turned six. That’s the way it happened. Time kept moving forward. We sang songs as we drove, ones I thought I would have forgotten by now. Mariposa made me remember things. She liked my horrible voice and ap­plauded. Everything she did was a treasure in my eyes. I was the godmother, after all. She belonged to me, too.

When we got to the orchard I pulled into the driveway, parked, and took Mari for a walk. She wore her hair in a pixie cut. Nina had told me she refused to let her hair grow; she hated to have it brushed and braided and fooled with.

“Smart girl,” I said. I told her that a lot.

“It smells good here,” Mari said as we walked in the grove.

She was right about that, too. The land had been sold at auction, and all the trees were in bloom. We walked down the road and waved to some of the workers.

“Hello!” Mariposa called to one of them who was pruning the branches. “Do you live in a tree?”

I have thought of Lazarus Jones, but he’s like a story I heard long ago. A story where I turned the pages even though I knew how it would end. Some things are like that, chaos theory aside. Turn left or turn right, you come to the same conclusions about certain things, the very same results. A young man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, who wasn’t afraid of death, who, when he got a chance to be someone else, had to take it.

By now the hole in the ground had been filled in with stone and rock. I suppose the new owner hoped to cover it with fertilizer and sod, maybe reclaim the soil. All the old trees had been cut down. I thought I saw a red orange on one of the trees, but it was just the slant of sunlight, turning a piece of orange fruit crimson.

My mother’s secret was that she never planned to meet her friends. The riddle of who she was. It was her thirtieth birthday. It was her least favorite month of the year. I had al­ways liked January. I liked ice. It was beautiful, like dia­monds, the brightest thing in the world. I liked to write my name in the cold, foggy window of my bedroom with my fingertip. I liked how black the sky was, how the stars seemed to hang down lower in the sky. It was before I cut off all my hair, froze my heart, blamed myself for everything that had ever happened. I was thinking about the future back then. I was looking forward.

My mother had something else in mind. Ned didn’t want me to know, so he hid the dishes she’d set out before she got in her car. He hid the fact that our mother hadn’t intended to come back. But maybe I knew anyway. Maybe I saw it on her face, in the sadness of the days before her birthday. I had caught her crying in the bathroom on more than one occa­sion. Our mother was the sort of person who didn’t do well alone, and even though she was with us, she was alone. She’d never heard the story of the girl who climbed up the mountain no one had ever climbed before. I hadn’t thought it up yet. She didn’t have any wishes left, or at least that’s what she must have believed, so the idea of a birthday might have stopped her cold. Nothing had turned out right. Except maybe us, maybe that’s why she left us breakfast, so we wouldn’t be worried and hungry. She probably didn’t even consider the way we would miss her. Each and every minute of each and every day.

I wondered if my mother’s last thoughts had been of us. Her children, home and safe. If her heart broke, it wasn’t because of the ice but because of us. Good-bye to us. Me on the porch, my brother at the window, the bats in the eaves of the roof. Good-bye. Good-bye. This last moment, that last moment. The ever after. The swirl of the sky.

If someone had told me of her plan, I could have chased after the car for miles. But it wouldn’t have mattered. She had already decided. She took one last moment of care to make certain we wouldn’t be hungry when we woke. When she saw the ice she probably felt she was lucky. Maybe that was her final wish. Some luck for once in her life. The life she’d had enough of. When she leaned down to kiss me good-bye maybe I heard it in her voice. She said, Good-bye, my darling girl . It may have been easier to blame myself than to think she would leave us that way. If she came back now, I do think she would know me; she’d still recognize me.

I have become the head of the reference desk in the library in Red Bank. Back where I used to be. A citizen of New Jer­sey. I never miss a day of work, and I’m a careful driver. I do check my tires in the fall, so they’ll be ready for the winter to come. I have now counted thirty-two colors of ice, from in­digo to scarlet. Maybe it’s the chemicals they use to salt the road, maybe it’s the way the light filters through the bare trees, maybe I’m just more sensitive to color than most people. In our house, every room is red, each a different shade: ruby, scarlet, cherry. Some people think it’s all the same, but the tones couldn’t be more different, as much so as black from white. Jack says I see what I want to see and hear what I want to hear and he wouldn’t have it any other way. Paint the ceiling red, if that’s the way you want it. He’ll be sur­prised when and if I do. He doesn’t seem to mind surprises. One time, when I drove back from Florida I had the New­foundland, Harry, in the car. Frances had retired, off to France as she’d planned, and I was always one to adopt a pet.

“Did you meet a bear on the road?” Jack asked me when I let Harry out of the car.

“I met you,” I said.

“You’re trying to flatter me so I don’t see how huge that dog is.” Jack had laughed. “He’ll take up half the living room.”

And that was the end of the conversation. Jack just whistled for the dog. He had faith in me and in my choices. We left it at that.

This is what I know, the one and only thing. The best way to die is while you’re living, even here in New Jersey. Even for someone like me. You’d laugh to know how long it’s taken me to figure that out, when all I had to do was cross over the mountains. When I walk to my car in the parking lot on winter nights, I have often noticed bats, a black cloud in the darkening sky. They bring me comfort. They make me feel you’re not so far away. To think, I used to be afraid. I used to run and hide. Now I stand and look upward. I don’t mind what the weather is; the cold has never bothered me. I hope what I’m seeing is the ever after. I hope it’s you.