Kind Things

Foreword

"The heart of another is a dark forest, always,

no matter how close it has been to one's own."

- Willa Cather

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At the top of a hill, there is a house.

Blushing peonies grow from the back wall beside a precarious, swinging door--hanging ajar on rusty hinges. The white paint around the doorknob is chipped away in patches, and so is the ash-green of the exterior wall. If it's Summer, the creaky windows are open. If it's Winter, they're iced over with frost. No matter the season, the dirt on the panes can't be scrubbed clean.

In the midst of a brisk Autumn years from now, leaves and the sounds of a harmonica spilling from the lips of a boy will float in on the breeze and catch in the threads of the rug while somewhere overseas bombs rain like hell-fire; but for now, all is quiet.

Save, of course, for the tinkling of a young girl at play who always, always, always forgot it was only a game.

To Ann Marie Dawson, time felt far, far away. It was something that only happened to other people. She observed time in the way the seasons changed--in how she grew--in how many baby teeth her younger sister lost. She saw her mother's hair turn white before Gracie's fifteenth birthday, counted each new line in her father's face, and kissed the still cheek of her grandfather before they lowered him into the ground--but she never felt time, and she believed she never would.

That was the beauty of it as she and her two sisters climbed up the ladder and through the tiny window into the hayloft every night. One after the other, like little mice they scurried into their hideaway, nestled together among the hay and cobwebs. There they unleashed a wonder found only along the spine of a most beloved book, where the three of them allowed their fantasy to reach out into their reality. What started as a simple, sweet gesture of an older sister became ritualistic and key to their happiness by the time Ann Marie was six. She was only a little girl then, but already she understood the sanctity of such a place. It preserved the shroud between Her World and The World, and kept time at bay.

As a child, the span of her world was wide and discovered in the most cherished places every day, uninhibited. The world wouldn't creep into Dawson House for some time, and she allowed people and places into her world without hesitation. She marveled at the life laid out before her, transfixed by the sights, the colors, the sounds, and the ventures of her adolescence and the kind of exciting promises they made to her.

From the beginning, Ann Marie was wild in her world. Everything she did she did with unabashed passion and the sort of disregard for social rules that made the adults in her life squeamish. To her, the line between her world and the world was drawn by distinctions between Us and Them.

There were those that mattered, and those that did not.

Those she trusted, and those she did not.

Those that rejected her, and those that she rejected.

Her world was her safe place--her kingdom. She wouldn't realize until much later that the things she did in her world also occurred in the world, and that these things came with consequences. Had she she known this, perhaps she could have stopped herself from inadvertently slipping further and further away, but she was so small and her world offered her the comfort of safe arms and something she could always count on. So like a top she spun and spun and spun until faces, rooms, gestures, words, and feelings all blurred together like the colors in a Monet and became something palpable only because it didn't feel too real.

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