“Winter Song” by Sarah Kilch Gaffney
May 19th, 2022 - Taryn Bowe was moved by Sarah Kilch Gaffney’s short essay “Winter Song” that appeared in the journal Farmer-ish. Bowe, who is writer, and the Associate Director of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, wrote this about the piece:
“I love the way Sarah Kilch Gaffney writes about life and death and grief and the passage of time. This essay, like so much of her work, deals with what happens, how we feel, when lives stop or slow but the world keeps going and changing. I admire the way this essay, like so much of Sarah’s work, fills me with a deeper appreciation of nature, of wondrous moments, and of the cycle of life.”
Sarah Kilch Gaffney
An excerpt from Winter Song:
“This night, the air is sharp with cold, the first real cold snap in what has been a strangely mild fall. Elsie weaves around the blueberry bushes, takes a turn to sniff around the kids’ playhouse, and nearly tangles the leash in the broken sunflower stalks that I still haven’t gotten around to cutting back. She stops by the rhubarb, always, for a few moments, and then continues to the stairs leading to the deck and the back door. This night, she stops halfway up the steps, not whining, but also not quite able to go on. I lift her up and over the last few steps and set her on the deck where she easily makes her way to the door to be let in.
How much has changed since that fall day when we brought her home as a little black and white ball of fluff. A little over a year later, my husband and I would sit together in a small room while an oncologist explained to us that the massive tumor recently removed from my husband’s brain was terminal. They couldn’t remove it all, it would eventually grow back, and it would eventually kill him. He was 27 years old.”