He reached into his pocket and took out the note he had found in his mailbox and tore it into little pieces, letting it slowly sift through his fingers, to be carried off by the cold wind that had kicked up. A weary old man, he stepped off the porch and with heavy footsteps and a heavier heart started the hike back to the car.
He had barely walked fifty feet up the trail when he felt a sudden rush of warm air overtake him from behind. The chirping of a songbird broke the icy silence. The path in front of him rapidly lost its veneer of snow and ice, as if someone were blow-drying it. Mack stopped and watched as all around him the white covering dissolved and was replaced by emerging and radiant growth. Three weeks of spring unfurled before him in thirty seconds. He rubbed his eyes and steadied himself in the swirl of activity. Even the light snow that had begun to fall had changed to tiny blossoms lazily drifting to the ground.
What he was seeing, of course, was not possible. The snowbanks had vanished, and summer wildflowers began to color the borders of the trail and into the forest as far as he could see. Robins and finches darted after one another among the trees. Squirrels and chipmunks occasionally crossed the path ahead, some stopping to sit up and watch him for a moment before plunging back into the undergrowth. He even thought that he glimpsed a young buck emerging out of a dark glade in the forest, but on second look it was gone. As if that weren’t enough, the scent of blooms began to fill the air, not just the drifting aroma of wild mountain flowers, but the richness of roses and orchids and other exotic fragrances found in more tropical climes.
Mack was no longer thinking about home. A terror gripped him, as if he had opened up Pandora’s Box and was being swept away into the center of madness, to be lost forever. Unsteady, he carefully turned around, trying to hold on to some sense of sanity.
He was stunned. Little, if anything, was the same. The dilapidated shack had been replaced by a sturdy and beautifully constructed log cabin, now standing directly between him and the lake, which he could see just above the rooftop. It was built out of hand-peeled full-length logs, every one scribed for a perfect fit.
Instead of the dark and forbidding overgrowth of brush, briars, and devil’s club, everything that Mack could see was now postcard perfect. Smoke was lazily wending its way from the chimney into the late afternoon sky, a sign of activity inside. A walkway had been built to and around the front porch, bordered by a small white picket fence. The sound of laughter was coming from nearby-maybe inside, but he wasn’t sure.
Perhaps this is what it was like to experience a complete psychotic break. “I’m losing it,” Mack whispered to himself. “This can’t be happening. This isn’t real.”
It was a place that Mack could only have imagined in his best dreams, and this made it all the more suspect. The sights were wondrous, the scents intoxicating, and his feet, as if they had a mind of their own, took him back down the walkway and up onto the front porch. Flowers bloomed everywhere and the mix of floral fragrances and pungent herbs aroused hints of memories long forgotten. He had always heard that the nose was the best link to the past, that the olfactory sense was the strongest for tapping into forgotten history, and now some long-stored remembrances of his own childhood flitted through his mind.
Once on the porch he stopped again. Voices were clearly coming from inside. Mack rejected the sudden impulse to run away, as if he were some kid who had thrown his ball into a neighbor’s flower garden. “But if God is inside, it wouldn’t do much good anyway, would it?” He closed his eyes and shook his head to see if he could erase the hallucination and restore reality. But when he opened them, it was all still there. He tentatively reached out and touched the wood railing. It certainly seemed real.
He now faced another dilemma. What should you do when you come to the door of a house, or cabin in this case, where God might be? Should you knock? Presumably God already knew that Mack was there. Maybe he ought to simply walk in and introduce himself, but that seemed equally absurd. And how should he address him? Should he call him Father, or Almighty One, or perhaps Mr. God, and would it be best if he fell down and worshipped, not that he was really in the mood.
As he tried to establish some inner mental balance, the anger that he thought had so recently died inside him began to emerge. No longer concerned or caring about what to call God and energized by his ire, he walked up to the door. Mack decided to bang loudly and see what happened, but just as he raised his fist to do so, the door flew open, and he was looking directly into the face of a large beaming African-American woman.
Instinctively he jumped back, but he was too slow. With speed that belied her size, she crossed the distance between them and engulfed him in her arms, lifting him clear off his feet and spinning him around like a little child. And all the while she was shouting his name-”Mackenzie Allen Phillips”-with the ardor of someone seeing a long-lost and deeply-loved relative. She finally put him back on earth and, with her hands on his shoulders, pushed him back as if to get a good look at him.
“Mack, look at you!” she fairly exploded. “Here you are, and so grown up. I have really been looking forward to seeing you face to face. It is so wonderful to have you here with us. My, my, my how I do love you!” And with that she wrapped herself around him again.
Mack was speechless. In a few seconds this woman had breached pretty much every social propriety behind which he had so safely entrenched himself. But something in the way that she looked at him and yelled his name made him equally delighted to see her too, even though he didn’t have a clue who she was.
Suddenly, he was overwhelmed by the scent emanating from her, and it shook him. It was the smell of flowers with overtones of gardenia and jasmine, unmistakably his mother’s perfume that he kept hidden away in his little tin box. He had already been perched precariously on the precipice of emotion, and now the flooding scent and attendant memories staggered him. He could feel the warmth of tears beginning to gather behind his eyes, as if they were knocking on the door of his heart. It seemed that she saw them too.
“It’s okay honey, you can let it all out… I know you’ve been hurt, and I know you’re angry and confused. So, go ahead and let it out. It does a soul good to let the waters run once in a while-the healing waters.”
But while Mack could not stop the tears from filling his eyes, he was not ready to let go-not yet, not with this woman. With every effort he could muster, he kept himself from falling back into the black hole of his emotions. Meanwhile, this woman stood there with her arms outstretched as if they were the very arms of his mother. He felt the presence of love. It was warm, inviting, melting.
“Not ready?” she responded. “That’s okay, we’ll do things on your terms and time. Well, come on in. Can I take your coat? And that gun? You don’t really need that, do you? We wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt, would we?”
Mack wasn’t sure what to do or what to say. Who was she? And how did she know? He was rooted to the spot where he stood, but slowly and mechanically took off his coat.
The large black woman gathered his coat and he handed her the gun, which she took from him with two fingers as if it was contaminated. Just as she turned to enter the cabin, a small, distinctively Asian woman emerged from behind her. “Here, let me take those,” her voice sang. Obviously, she had not meant the coat or gun, but something else, and she was in front of him in a blink of an eye. He stiffened as he felt something sweep gently across his cheek. Without moving, he looked down and could see that she was busy with a fragile crystal bottle and a small brush, like those he had seen Nan and Kate use for makeup, gently removing something from his face.