Abigail
By
Emma Teller
Chapter I
Abigail woke up with a smile. It was later than she would have liked and it
seemed that yet again she had slept through her alarm, but she just couldn’t
help smiling and lay quite still, with that warm, feeling of sleep tingling in
her body. It was raining. She loved rainy days. Rain was the first ‘ingredient’ towards snow
and the cold, white days of winter were her very favorites of all. This December had been a pretty good one,
snow wise, and she had great hopes for January, too. Finally, she got up, scurried into her
clothes and threw on her boots and coat.
The first thing she always did, before she even turned on the coffee or
make a plan for the day was go outside.
She was always her very best self out there, in the fresh air. Since it was not raining hard enough to
warrant an umbrella in her opinion, she went hoodless, bareheaded, letting the
misty drops cover her head with a web of dew.
There were deer in the yard this morning, as usual, and she really
wished they would run away already –
deer were supposed to be timid after all, weren’t they?? And she did hate when things were not acting
according to the ‘nature’ of how there were meant to be. Oh well, she thought and sighed. There, at least, were the trees – now a tree you
could always count on. Trees never left
their spot, and lived every moment of their lives doing just what trees ought
to do: grow down before they grew up and
then grow up before they grew out.
Another wisdom of the tree was how it always knew to grow towards the light in a desperate yearning for the
sun. No matter where they grew, be it on
a cliff side or in the thick of a forest, a tree would do anything necessary to
get to that sun. The shapes their mass of branches made,
forming a silent, throbbing harmony, always gave her terrifying surge of
delight. Turning around at the top of
the road, where the mailboxes were, a far walk from the house, she headed back
to make coffee.
-----
Taking her coat off and throwing it on the
back of a chair Abigail turned towards
making breakfast . Cutting her pear in half she was disappointed to find it was
on the harder side of soft, but quickly pushed this thought aside and eagerly waited for her
coffee – the best part of breakfast – to finish dripping. It was sure to be a winner of a day in the
studio, at any rate, anything would be improvement from yesterday and she was on the tips of her toes inside to
get there and begin making sense of the mess she had made on poor Homer, the
cast she was drawing. She did the
crossword puzzle as she ate, but only disinterestedly, for her real mind and
heart were always with her art, especially when there were problematic passages
that she had been forced to leave in an unresolved state when those irksome
duties of daily life called her away from the studio.
