One

My mother pulls her knees up in the big chair by the morning window. That's what she calls it, the morning window, where she sits to forget she lives in a place where winter comes and stays too long. Godforsaken, she says at times, when she thinks she can't possibly bear one more minute of a northern Ontario winter.

It was here, she said, pointing to the ground beneath her with an angry jab of her finger, that the glaciers stopped and burped, leaving a tract of farmland in between the rocks and lakes, along the Rainy River, before they, the glaciers, continued on with their gouging and tearing up the soil and scraping down to the bare rock, carving out the Canadian Shield. She shivers and pulls her shoulders up and closes her eyes, probably trying to imagine that winter has gone, that the sky is blue and warm and calm.

"As if England's any better," my father says, an accusing tone in his voice as he flings insult for insult. My mother never lets on, shakes her head and closes her eyes.

The rising sun shines in through the window's glass and drenches my mother in light, the many shades of yellow woven in and out of her hair pulled back in a braid. Her hair is almost always tied back, gathered with her magic fingers, fingers that work on their own without her eyes, without a mirror. I can't remember her hair ever hanging loose. She holds a white porcelain mug up to her face, the steam from the coffee rising up around her. She breathes in as though the smell itself might warm every cell in her body. She looks like she is dreaming.

I want to stand in front of her and memorize the details of her, the colour of her cheeks, flushed slightly on either side, her eyebrows thick but perfectly shaped, her lashes long and sweeping, her eyes a deep blue, somewhere between blue and green, a single dimple, the mirror image of mine, on the left side, a deep fissure where I am tempted to place my finger, wiggle it to see where the hole goes. I want to memorize the way she runs the backs of her fingers along her jaw and drops her eyes when she is tired, as if her mother might have done the same when my mother was little, a genetic motion. I want to memorize how she stands up tall, her back arched with her hand on her forehead, her teeth together, a look that says I've had enough, a warning to everyone but me.