Emily Brisse

This is just to say that the days are getting longer and our windows all are open, and the house feels thicker, full-lunged, porous, bare-kneed. This is just to say that we skipped spring here, went straight to summer, sweaty t-shirts and pink brows, bicycles and bicycles and bicycles. Mostly, though, this is to say that on the first hot day of this new season, I walked with my son to the lake where I'd told him it was time to arrive , and when we came home, for the first time in his life, he laughed.

Okay, not one can write a symphony, or a dictionary,    or even a letter to an old friend, full of remembrance    and comfort. Not one can manage a single sound though the blue jays    carp and whistle all day in the branches, without     the push of the wind.  But to tell the truth after a while I'm pale with longing     for their thick bodies ruckled with lichen  and you can't keep me from the woods, from the tonnage     of their shoulders, and their shining green hair.  Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a     little sunshine, a little rain.  Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from     one boot to another -- why don't you get going?  For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.  And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists     of idleness, I don...

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A snow "event" is tapering off outside my window, dropping perhaps ten inches of new white, and where half the state's population is elated and the other half depressed (a friend reminded me it was 80' right around this time last year here), my mind has never been more inside, less focused on coats and boots, more in tune with another body's breath. I have decided that late winter is the perfect time to welcome an infant into the world. All there is to do is cuddle. Elliot is wonderful, friends, and I hope each of you know how much I've appreciated your support and positive thoughts throughout his journey here. Right now he is beside me, asleep. This means I should start dinner. This means I should fold some clothes. This means I should call the insurance company. This means I should actually unload the dishwasher, which was a task I began this morning and got as far as, oh, opening its door. I'm learning that there are a lot of things that should but do...

Right now the side of his face rests against my belly, skin to skin, his warmth magnified by mine. It is a wonder, an absolute awe-filled thing, that just days ago he was on the other side of me, tucked away and unseeable, a secret. Elliot. Elliot with the head full of hair. Elliot with the fifty-eight eyelashes. Elliot with the rounded nose that dips into rounded cheeks that slope to the tiny chin that quivers when he cries, lifts when he smiles in his sleep. A landscape. Elliot. Tiny boy so like and unlike all the other boys who have been born before. So like and unlike whatever small person I imagined my own son to be. Perfection is a rare if not impossible thing, but how could he not be, right now, so young, so soft, exactly as he is here, breathing in and out, making the sounds that all mothers and fathers know as first-speak. Secrets. He is revealing them to me, unspooling them by the minute, by the number of his sighs, and they tangle around my legs and body until I am war...

When I think back to these final days before your birth, I will remember several things: the cayenne pepper I mixed generously into every soup and onto every entree I made; the yoga ball I bounced on while your father put the groceries or laundry or Chunky Monkey away; the quiet powdery snow that came several cold nights in a row, perfect and smooth, leaving one or two new inches for us to discover at dawn; how I stopped dreaming of you, and instead talked with you during the day, the hours coated with my pep-talks, my explanations, all my hopes I knew you were hearing. In the dark hours I would lay on my left side, a pillow between my knees and under your weight, your father wrapped around us both, and he and I would close our eyes, so warm, as the world outside went on and on and on and we waited to enter it with you in our arms, too. There were also daily walks where I tried my best to coax you, rock you into trusting the air. On a 12’ afternoon I bundled us up and trekked across th...

in Dutch:     winter in German:     winter in Danish:     vinter in Icelandic:     vetur in French:     hiver in Finnish:    talvi in Catalan:    hivern in Italian:     inverno in Spanish:     invierno in Latin:     hiems in Greek:     χειμώνας in Persian:         زمستان in Thai:     ฤดูหนาว in Chinese:     冬天 in Japanese:     冬 in Russian:     зима in Maori:     takurua in Figian:      vulaililiwa in Somali:    jiilaal in Zulu:     ubisika in Turkish:     kış Or, in Me: warm kisses cold noses old music echoes clasped hands beards, thick with icicles frost-lace quiet snow-bowed trees  red cheeks long, finely-knitted scarves wind furnaces people pressed together wooly mittens mul...