North Carolina Literature and the Other Arts
N C L R ONLINE
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FINALIST, 2016 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY GINA MALONE
Yesterday’s Snow
That house is unfamiliar now, the yard, the view across and up and down the road. There’s a business highway across that field where we played, where I stepped on a Coke bottle’s broken bottom, the scar on my foot to this day. The store is gone, and the mill, that beautifully ugly iron trestle bridge across Lawson’s Fork Creek. Only now do I know the name of that rocky waterway.
A South Carolina native, GINA MALONE received her BA in English with a minor in journalism from Rutgers University. She is a freelance writer with a background in reporting and editing, but her first love is creative writing. She recently retired from nineteen years as owner of a bookstore in Western North Carolina to devote herself to writing. She now lives in Asheville, NC.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Here at February’s end there is yesterday’s snow melting, with more said to be on the way, and when I talk to my father he speaks his remembrance, in sad tones now that he is seventy-six, of snows that fell when my sister and brother and I were little. Twice now in phone conversations he has brought up those days, how one of us, my sister, I think, wore his hunting cap, the snow up to our knees. I recall the photographs more than the actual day. Bundled, I smiled big beside the snowman taller than I was.
The Way Inside – three, 2015 (mixed media on panel, 18x12x2) by Sondra Dorn
I don’t remember a sign – I don’t remember ever asking, ever knowing as a child that places had to have names so that when everything else changed you could find your way back there again; or knowing that there should be snapshots and scars so that remembrances spoken would not be like flakes that float down on the cold air, only to disappear when the next day’s sun crosses a fresh blue sky.