The Secret of Clouds by Alyson Richman

Author:Alyson Richman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

I placed the note back in the ripped envelope and then inside the journal. For now, my frustration at home was eased by the purity of Yuri’s gesture. I wondered for a moment what my life would be like without teaching, and I thought about how Katya had once described the size of a person’s heart as mirroring the size of a clenched fist. I loosened my grip on the journal and placed it on the car seat next to me. My heart opened, like a hand releasing a balloon up into the air.

43

LEAVING Yuri’s house, I felt the way Suzie had often described as “walking the line.” She said it meant when a person experienced two intense emotions at once. One could feel extremely happy and also horribly sad at the same moment.

It was terrible to admit, but as full as my heart was after receiving Yuri’s beautiful note, I started to dread returning home. Perhaps it was because Bill and I had yet to trim our tree. Or maybe it was because every time I suggested we read together or snuggle by the fire, or I tried to share something amusing that Yuri had said, he had no interest. Maybe because it had been six months since we had begun renting the cottage, and we had yet to cook a single meal together.

So instead of driving straight home after Yuri’s, I decided to go to my parents’ house first. My sadness over my current home life made me nostalgic for my own childhood traditions. I loved helping my mother prepare the dough for the ravioli using Grandma Valentina’s old rolling pin, or watching her as she dipped her pastry brush in olive oil and confidently glided it over sheets of pasta.

I drove slowly to make sure I didn’t skid. The twenty-minute drive out to Strong’s Neck was scenic but often icy in the winter. Still, the ride was cathartic for me. I loved seeing the old farms of my childhood, their pitched roofs dusted in snow and set against an oyster blue sky. I felt my body soften as I drove over the narrow Strong’s Bridge, frosted over with ice.

So much of my youth was connected to this landscape. How I loved when my mother told me bedtime stories about the heroic Revolutionary War spy Anna Strong, who had lived a stone’s jump from my own house two hundred years before. “She communicated her information for the American soldiers via the color of the clothes on her laundry line,” my mother told me as she sat on the edge of my bed, her face illuminated by a beam of white moonlight. I would fall asleep thinking about Anna standing outside her clapboard home, her cotton dress fluttering in the breeze, her hands pulling colorful clothes out of her laundry basket and pinning them on a string to form a secret code.

Even decades later, the memory of my mother bringing Anna to life stirred something inside me.

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