She sealed the letter and set it with the things to go to town and sat for a moment with young Henry asleep in the cradle and the fire low and even in the stove and the snow making the clearing outside the window into something luminous and strange. She tried to find the name for what she felt. Not happy, not unhappy, something more layered than either. The feeling of a person who has been through enough to understand that contentment was not a place you arrived at, but a condition you maintained daily. The way you maintained a roof, checking after every hard storm, replacing what the weather had taken, never quite finished, but never quite failing either.
She was maintaining it. That was enough. That was in fact more than she had expected to have when she stepped off that wagon onto the southeastern corner of this claim with a pack and a tool chest and a child pressing against her ribs and no clear idea how any of it was going to work. February brought the hardest cold of the winter, the kind of cold that made the cabin walls contract and moan at night. And she lay on the cot listening to it and checking off against her inventory in her head.
Firewood, food stores, chinking the insulation under the floorboards, and finding everything where it should be. She had prepared for this. She had prepared for everything she could see coming, and the things she had not seen coming, she had handled when they arrived, and that was the whole of it, and it was enough. Young Henry, at 4 months, had developed a personality. It was a large personality for a small person and it expressed itself primarily through his opinions about when he wanted to be held and when he wanted to be put down and when he wanted to eat and when he found the suggestion of eating patronizing given that he had eaten 20 minutes ago.
He had Henry's stubbornness and Clara was fairly certain her directness which meant that the combination was going to be interesting in approximately 3 years and she was already forming plans. He had also begun to look at Amos with a particular quality of attention. Not the generalized fascination of an infant looking at anything that moved, but something more specific, a tracking attention that suggested recognition. The first time she noticed it, she said nothing. The second time she filed it.
By the third time, she understood that young Henry had formed a preference, which was notable in a person who could not yet control his own hands. And she thought about what that meant and then put it in the category of things she was not going to overthink. Amos noticed too. She could tell from the way his face did the thing when young Henry looked at him. The room with different curtains, the soft, careful thing underneath the surface of a face that was not generally a face that showed much on the surface.
He never mentioned it, neither did she, but it was there, and they both knew it was there, and that was its own kind of conversation. Spring came in March, tentatively at first. A few days of warmth that retreated back into cold, the snow pulling away from the south-facing slopes and then returning, the creek running higher and noisier with melt, and then going quiet again when the temperature dropped. Then in April, it committed. The snow pulled back from the clearing in earnest.
And one morning she woke to the sound of water running freely in the creek and the particular quality of light that meant the sky had decided to be warm and was not changing its mind. She stood in the doorway with young Henry on her hip. 6 months old, alert and opinionated and very interested in anything that moved, which in spring at altitude meant birds, and he tracked them with a focused intensity that she found disproportionately endearing. And she looked at the garden beds under their straw covering and thought about what she was going to plant and where and how much. She had ordered more seed than last year.