If I were a bear, particularly a Polar one, it might be easier to get through the long dark days. I could sleep, for one thing, and wake up when it's over. And now. Now it’s not even January any more. The days have come and gone, moved everything around me into spring forcing summer. Without warning, it's August. Calendar pictures hang until eyes beg for something else to look at. But slowness gives me time to adapt. Here. Here it is August only on the outside, only without being warm. I'm not over the cold of December, I take my time, remain layered-up with fat and fur, and slumber in caves.

    She was in the kitchen and, although she couldn’t see me, she was sure to have heard the squeak of the screen door. That screen door, which had outlived two generations moving into the third. I knew easily what she’d been doing before I had entered. Moving from one chore to the next, from sweeping to doing the dishes to getting lunch to doing dishes again. Her body routined mine. No one was allowed in the kitchen on Thursday’s after dinner so that she could mop and wax. Baths came and went at eight p.m Monday through Friday. You could set your clock by her. She left the house only to get groceries and attend church. Sometimes she scolded me but then reached into her handbag to give me a hard candy wrapped in shiny cellophane. "Here," she said. "Now be a good girl."

    I watched the roses grow eight feet tall. I've been faithful. They're beautiful but they've grown unnaturally tall. Deformed hybrids. Still, didn’t we enjoy gathering them in big yellow bunches when the bees and wasps buzzed in our ears and the dog lay sleeping on the porch? When the days were hot and the air was almost too thick to breathe? With the fragrance sticking to our sweaty skin? Remember? Bringing them into the kitchen, laying them on the counter, the spiders and pinchers skeetering out from between the petals? Disoriented they fell off the edge of the counter, and we squished them under our sandals. Remember putting the huge bundles of roses into the sink and letting the cold water run gently over them causing more fragrance to be released? We were giddy as opiate junkies falling headfirst.

    Before my own children could be born, before I could say "Merry Christmas!" again to her, before I could put on thick armor or find a cave, she was gone. My eyes wide open. She left.

    There’s some songs you should stop playing. Once is enough. That one, over and over with its refrain. I examine her face in photographs. I place my body into the form of her routines; cooking meals, sweeping, mopping. The roses bloom and fall to the ground. Who would dare to touch them now? I gather the loose petals up to my face and breathe in their sweetness.

    Four candies wrapped in shiny cellophane lay waiting on the table, and one in my mouth.