I was raised by artists in an isolated town by the ocean, where garbage collection was just a man riding on the back of a pickup truck and the police looked the other way when the trailer park king sold individual cans of beer to minors on the weekends.
Our house was more than a hundred years old. Secured to a dory by rope, it had been floated across the water from another, smaller community. I was told the water rippled as the boat glided through, pulling the house, its furniture and photographs shifting from side to side as it sailed along. Once settled onshore, it was balanced on a row of logs and hauled by horses to its resting place.
I preferred to believe that it was moved by giants. They simply plucked up our two-storey saltbox with their enormous hands and set it gently down on the lawn, like a child playing with her toys.
My parents bought our house when my mother was pregnant. She was twenty-three years old, and beautiful in a way that caused men to fall in love at first sight. Suiters would write poems about her, moaning Jayde, Jayde, Jayde, swearing they would die if she didn’t return their affections. She was often silent, lost in a daydream. Sweet Jayde, they’d say, come back down to earth. My father said she exuded a darkness to which he was instantly attracted. They had met at a party. My father saw my mother across a crowded room, later analogizing the encounter to being struck by a bolt of lightning. My mother couldn’t remember him being at the party.
My father was a writer, my mother a painter and sculptor.
They had owned a bungalow in the city, but decided to move when my mother became pregnant with me. She spent hours sitting in the living room, her bare legs draped over the arm of a chaise longue, perusing magazines on idyllic small-town living. Their plans were birthed from an old-fashioned notion of romance: two young artists, moving to the country to pursue their careers and raise their family in controlled safety.
My brother, William, was two when they moved. The property needed a lot of work, but that wasn’t a problem. My father could do anything.
I was born on the first day of December. Large, fluffy snowflakes drifted peacefully from the sky, clinging to the windowpane of my mother’s hospital room. As she clutched me, swaddled in the softness of a blush blanket, she whispered, “Grace, you brought the first snowfall.”