The pine tree branches shivered off snow as Gabe pushed through them. He kept his grumbling internal, even when the icy powder fell into the slight gap between his scarf and his neck. Sharon didn't like him to talk on the way to lessons--something about "absorbing the moment of transition"--and his mother would never forgive him for disobeying a teacher's direct instruction. Besides, Sharon was cool, for all her odd habits of mind.
"Here," Sharon announced, coming to a sunny clearing. The longest side was about six feet wide, Gabe estimated, and the other sides tapered into a sloppy but definite natural triangle. Despite the knee-deep snow, Gabe felt a grin split his face. Today's lesson would involve magic.
"Spring is starting," Sharon announced, despite the overwhelming and cold evidence to the contrary. He might have made a face, because she continued, breath steaming in the air, "Even in Maine. The quality of light has changed. Sap stirs. We exist in the margin between seasons. Water exists in three forms, twisting back and forth." She closed her eyes, inhaling. "Marvelous."
When Sharon exhaled, her breath emerged in a cloud of snowflakes. They gave a curious quiver and became drops of water suspended in the air. Gabe's eyes filled with tears as they shone like tiny diamonds, then evaporated as though they'd never been there at all.
"Now you try," Sharon said. She didn't say anything more as Gabe wiped away the one tear that managed to escape. She was understanding like that, despite being a woman and closer to his grandmother's age than Gabe's.
Gabe spent the next thirty minutes huffing and puffing to no avail, of course. Sharon wasn't like any of his public school teachers, giving directions and then explaining them again if you didn't get it the first time. She expected you to pay attention and figure things out for yourself. It was maddening, and only the subject material--magic, real magic, because of all people in town, only the skinny mixed race kid showed a knack for it--kept him trying.
Okay. Being the Big Bad Wolf isn't helping, Gabe thought. He had called lightning at the height of summer in a burst of energy, convinced the last roses of autumn to bloom, and dreamed with bears hibernating in winter. Every success had come from finding a place of perfect stillness, a place where he was open to everything and at the same time the most Gabe he had ever been.
So be Gabe, he thought, and then it was easy. He was most himself in the quiet focus of woodwork, in the thrill of a pretty girl's smile, in the tears he shed when something was so beautiful it brought with it a kind of ache.
Facing the point of the triangle, Gabe called back the escaped tear from earlier. Its connection to him hadn't yet faded, and Gabe tugged gently on that thinning tether until it reappeared. It hung in the air as a single snowflake until Gabe called more water from the surrounding air. He laughed and they all became drops of water; laughed again and they reunited with the air. Joy and sorrow and the space between--that was magic.
"Well done," was all Sharon said. She was a woman of few words, except in one of her philosophical moods. "Let's go home."
A-plus for the day, Gabe thought, though he knew better than to say it aloud.
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