The Abundance
  By Emily Wingreen

During a particularly dry winter, when all my friends had gone, I went to the plaza to see a favorite band. The wind blew goose bumps onto my bare skin as I watched the last song and helped them pack up. Sylvan, one of the players, showed me a large blister on his finger and made a sad face. I returned his greeting by showing him that I had a larger blister from drumming in a parade the day before. He announced that he would construct a shrine for me and I said the same.

The year before the dry winter there was a wet one. Snow flew from the sky every couple of days and I was having more fun with my new friends than I’d ever had. The spring melt made the Santa Fe Arroyo flow enough to go kayaking.

There is a cottonwood tree that bends particularly low trying to reach this river. It creates a little shelter near the base of the trunk. I built a shrine there for Sylvan during the only snow of the dry winter, a small stop on a long walk. In the middle was the base of a clear bottle which had been broken. Plastic spoons and soda tabs outlined the perimeter and a single cowry sat in the center. Due to our combined awkwardness Sylvan and I can’t really hold a conversation, so I never told him about the shrine.

Last winter there was a lot of snow. My now old friends came back but our ties were sadly displaced. I went sledding a lot at the dog park, a collection of hills and jumps by my house. I remember my mom talking on the phone in the winter of 2000. She said that after a wet winter there was often death.

That spring my dog died. After last winter one of my best friends, who happened to be a cat, died.

By the time I was eight it had sunk in that cats and dogs had shorter lives than humans. I decided that when one of my cats did die, I would kill myself too. I went to the kitchen and picked out a long bread knife with which I’d decided to cut through my middle.

When Hobbs died I was holding him. I sobbed on my mom’s bed and she told me that since there was nothing I could do about it, it was ok.

A few days ago my aunt died. Someone called for her and my grandpa went to wake her up. She did not wake up. No one knows what caused her death, she was only fifty. I overheard my dad talking on the phone and he said that her migraines were getting better. My brother said that she might have had a dream she was dying and not woken up to realize she wasn’t.

My dad was crying a fresh tide of tears when he said “kids, this is not how the world is, people don’t just die in their sleep, my family is weird.” I told him that the world was in fact full of unexplained death and that we were part of his family.

In the car my aunt left behind I notice a strong smell of sun screen and memories. “This car smells like my aunt” I said last Monday as I clambered in. “I loved my aunt, I never get to see her again.” Ari, a friend who was with me at the time, looked at me in pity. I try to keep the car clean like Sarah did, I add to the change in the purse that remains, but I don’t use the petroleum chap stick she left in the world of the living. When the mood strikes I circle around the pointless round about in my neighborhood with great velocity the way she used to.

My dad was looking forward to his forty ninth year to be his best. When his sister died he felt this hope was lost. My mom pointed out that we’re not given one emotion or set of circumstances at a time; we are given everything at once at all times. Some of these times are abundant with precipitation, others are not.

I looked down at the paper on my bathroom floor yesterday, it predicted next winter to be a dry one.