Chapter 2: A Vision

They left the dwindling bustle and noise of the market square and were soon hurrying down the wagon road through the forest, Rose tugging Jesse along behind. It was a bright day but only a sliver of sunlit blue sky was visible through the canopy above. Here and there on either side, in patches of deep shadow under the ancient trees, stubborn snowdrifts still clung to winter's cold.

Jesse considered how odd the twists and turns of life were. After all, he'd only just become a man, and he'd spent most of his brief manhood floating down the river and sleeping under the stars on pebble beaches, or in little caves lit by smoky firelight, all of it alone; and now he'd fallen in love. He wasn't sure how to be a man in love. He had some ideas about it, of course. But he'd never done it before. So far his young manhood hadn't been too much different from boyhood, but he realized that was about to change. It crossed his mind that he might never sleep in a cave again, and the thought was unexpectedly melancholy. "It's amazing how quickly life moves sometimes," he wondered aloud.

"Isn't it?" Rose huffed, though she hadn't actually heard him. She was still very put out at the fact that whatever he'd said, he'd said it when the snowdrops were bowing their tiny white heads to the warmth of April sunshine and the tulips were just beginning to kindle their cheery pastel glow.

"It isn't right!" She muttered. "There'll be none left in September. Not a single daffodil."

"I'm sorry, I didn't catch that."

"Oh, it's not important," she grumbled. She pressed on, her feet kicking up little puffs of forest duff as she tugged Jesse along behind her. They marched on that way in silence for several minutes, both of them lost in their own musings about what was and what would be. You might think it's silly, to spend the first few moments of a love story that way. And you'd be right! But people are often silly. We like to plant our minds everywhere but where our feet are. Rose's feet were walking the valley floor in spring with a strange, exciting young man, but her mind was making winter cobbler with her husband and a daughter whose name was either Finley or Alice or possibly Charlie, and who'd been born the night before Christmas. But you know as well as I do that daydreams never last, and though Rose sometimes did silly things, she was not a silly person.

She sighed aloud as she returned to spring in the valley. "It's not important," she repeated— and suddenly she meant it. The reality of her situation stuck her.

She forgot all about the fresh apple bread in the basket under her arm, which she'd baked with the very last shriveled apples from last October's stores, and which she'd meant to trade for crushed oyster shells to add to the laying hen's scraps to strengthen their eggs. She forgot all about that whole arm, actually. All her attention focused on her other hand, which was wrapped tightly — and a little moistly, she was embarrassed to find — around a strange young man's hand, where they stood alone on a little-used road beside a babbling brook in a deep, old forest among the tulips and snowdrops and the first cherry blossoms at springtime.

She stopped abruptly and stood stock still, silently shaking at the horror of her appearance reflected in the cold, clear water beside her. She dropped Jesse's hand and wiped hers on her deerskin pants, suddenly wishing she'd worn something a little lovelier to the market and that she'd picked the brambles out of her hair or at least bathed sometime in the last week.

Jesse was a little confused at the sudden change. He was still too dazed to notice the brambles in Rose's hair or the dirt behind her ears. He hadn't picked the brambles out of his own hair in years (he actually kind of liked them there), and he hadn't bathed in weeks on his long canoe trip down from the mountains. The river was far too cold. He'd get to it in June.

"Are you alright?" he asked, still confused and now a little concerned. "You're twitching."

Rose immediately stopped twitching. She made a little squeak and dashed off behind an enormous spruce tree, leaving Jesse fidgeting on the road. It couldn't have been more than a minute or two, but Rose left him alone in the silence of the woods long enough for him to get over the shock of the paradigm shift he'd just experienced and thus return to his senses. He wasn't really as dense as you might've imagined from our view of him so far. Like any of us, he just needed a second or two to readjust when the course of his entire life changed in a moment.

This was that moment.

And so it was with the kind of wide-eyed, slack-jawed wonder that only those who have been lovers in springtime know that he beheld the vision of Eden who flitted out from the shadows of the forest into the dappled sunlight on the road. She was still clad in her dirty deerskin pants but her brambly hair had become a braid of liquid gold dotted with snowdrops bobbing like little white wedding bells and her cheeks were rosy red where she'd scrubbed them clean with a handful of snow, and the smell of crushed pine needles and sliced apple bread floated all around her.

"Let's try this again," said the vision. "I'm Rosie."

"Are you really?" said the bewitched boy. "I think you are a vision of Eden."

"Well, I'm not," Rosie lied, and knew it. She blinked once, slowly, and smiled without showing any teeth.

The decisive young man standing where the bewitched boy had been gawking just moments before reached out for Rosie's hand, kissed it, and said, "I'm Jesse. Can I walk you home, meet your family, marry you, build you a little stone house in the forest, and provide for you and our thirteen children all the days of my life?"

Rosie laughed. "Maybe you can start with walking me home."