The end of fall was heralded by the unexpected frost, a cold
wind coming down from the north, a gift of the Canadians to their black sheep
cousins to the south. As it is wont to do each fall, the brisk winds clear the
deciduous forests, opening vistas and covering trails, making clean and fresh
what had become pale and brown. Winter isn’t harsh if you stay inside, but to
the denizens of the doorways and streets of Manchester, harsh is exactly what
winter is. Winter is something to fear, to dread with shaking bones, an anxiety
that did not go from night to night, day to day, but for weeks on end.
Emily, who had never really experienced snow let alone a
real winter, had marveled at the hail that fell so thick, only to be chuckled
at for the small snow squall and its sleety snow that had come through for the
briefest of moments. She would later lament the long darkness that was a
winter’s day in New Hampshire, and feel the burden of the seasonal depression
that was its shroud. She would learn she liked the idea of snow, but not snow,
not the snow that came early and beautiful, and left late and blackened, that
made for “9 months of winter, and 3 months of damn poor sledding”.
She had come for the art school, but in the spring of her
first year, her father had been fired from a job he never liked, by people he
liked even less, and there really was no way for her to make ends meet without
mortgaging her soul for a future that would never earn it back. She was too
young to sell her future, there being no equity in it. So she left school, and
having no where else to go, stayed in Manchester, taking her part time job as a
crusher of coffee beans at Starbucks, and turning it into a full time job as a
packer of pills at PillPack. She still couldn’t afford the rent, nor could her
roommates, but together they could manage as long as none of them slipped
up. Nothing special, a walk up over
Cesario’s, but it was an easy walk down Spring Street over to the Waumbec Mill
building on the edge of the Merrimack River where PillPack stuffed peoples
lives into little heat sealed plastic bags.
Emily had met Sarah and her girl friend Jennifer two summers
ago when she had first come to the New Hampshire Institute of Art. They had
lived in the same college dorm in the YMCA, and that first spring they took an
apartment together over the pizza shop on Elm Street, pretty much just across
the street. The two lovers took one room, and Emily got the other. No one was
ever there, between work and school, so it worked. The place always smelled of
Cesario’s Pizza, which was a mainstay of their diet. It was like their cat,
Fido, had a place of his own and they just slept there.
Fido. What a life. They left a window out back cracked open
enough for him to make his way out, and using his cat wiles he easily made it
to street level to make his rounds. The heat always seemed to be on hellfire,
no matter what they did with the thermostat, so keeping the window open might
have been to vent the heat, but still, a path is a path between his two worlds.
In, out, it was all up to him and his cat mood. He tended to hit the street early
in the morning when it was dry. Fido doesn’t do wet. But he does do snickey’s,
so he makes his way down one side of Elm Street and at some point turns around
and comes back up the other. There is always someone who tosses him a bit of
somethin’-somethin’, and by the time he made it back to the apartment he had
had breakfast. Well, first breakfast, because in the apartment there was his
bowl of dry, and once a day, a plate of some yummy wet food. Yeah, he does that
kinda wet. Food was never an issue. Home is where the fresh water and wet food
are. And where Emily is.
