Callie doesn’t wake up to the sound of bickering car horns. Doesn’t hear her alarm shriek noisily from her nightstand. Doesn’t see the morning claw its way through the cityscape with the pushy bitterness of a jilted ex-boyfriend (she’s well accustomed to both).

She simply wakes up, and she’s not sure if she likes it.

Here in the country, the November sun slides sleekly over the horizon with the smoothness of butter in a pan, the farm warmed by its cool golden light. Everything is almost perfectly silent, save the songbirds and the rustle of the wind through the fields. It’s not quite pleasant, not quite jarring, but it’s entirely unfamiliar.

Callie sits up and rubs her eyes, the remnants of sleep still clouding heavily on the edges of her vision. She registers that the blankets on her bed have been twisted into an anxious heap on the floor, a reminder of how she’d spent the entire night lying awake, watching the tree shadows sway on the ceiling the same way insomnia swayed inside her.

That’s a good thing, though. Because sleeping means dreaming, and dreaming means imagining, and imagining means all those possibilities that she can’t get away from.

Callie swings her feet off the bed and pads out of the room.

It’s a small house, just big enough to breathe in, just cozy enough to feel like the walls are embracing her. The sunlight falls through the windows, lighting up the simple furniture and its straightforward arrangement: the patchy sofas squatting around the fireplace, the tiny kitchen, the tinier dining table. Everything on this farm is laid out plainly, as if to say, hello, here I am, this is how I’ve always been and how I’ll always be.

“What are you doing up so early?”

Callie turns to see her grandmother emerging from her own room on the other side of the house, and she takes in the faint smile on the older woman’s face. She looks warm and golden-hued in the sunrise’s light. Alexandra’s hair is long and wavy like Callie’s, but it’s beginning to turn the same shade of silver as the frost edging the cottage’s roof.

She feels a million words churn in her stomach in an unstoppable whirlpool. I was worried. I was scared.

“The sun woke me,” she answers, trailing her hand along the kitchen counter. It’s covered with various pots and pans they brought from the city, and she knows every hairline crack in their surfaces—mostly because she was the one who made most of them—but it still doesn’t feel like home. “I forgot to draw the curtains last night.”

Alexandra looks exasperated, almost, or maybe affectionate. With her, the two are often synonymous. “Didn’t I remind you before you went to bed?”

“I think you did,” Callie says, trying to infuse as much firmness into her voice as possible.

Alexandra chuckles and looks toward the bathroom, her face lined with age and the morning light. “Well, now that you’re up, we should get ready for the day. Time won’t wait for us.”

“Wait,” Callie blurts out. “Can we…” The words feel plaintive, the speaking patterns of a child, but she continues anyway. “Can we bake cookies?”

Alexandra’s gaze turns concerned. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, why?”

“You only ask to bake with me when something’s wrong.” Alexandra folds her arms, her expression steely. It’s the kind of small realization that would ordinarily warm Callie like a mug of hot chocolate, but today, it brings tears to her eyes instead. 

She turns away, trying to appear nonchalant. “Just a little homesick.”

Alexandra studies Callie intently, then reaches into the bowl of fruits sitting on the counter. “Cookies it is, then,” she says, pulling out a lemon. Its cheerful yellow seems to glow  in the soft country morning. “Do you remember the recipe?”

“Of course,” says Callie truthfully, though when she enters the kitchen too and reaches for the ingredients, her fingers fumble through the cabinets as uncertainly as they would if the room was pitch black. This house is like a maze she’s never been in, a stretched reflection of her normal life, where everything has been moved just a little bit to the right.

But here in the kitchen, she and her grandmother work together with the expertise of two people well acquainted with each other. They measure out the ingredients in sync, hands moving in tandem, and pass each other baking tools without a single spoken word. She finds herself trying to memorize this moment, clinging to it like a drowning person to a life raft.

“You should be grateful your great-aunt Eleanor is letting us stay here.” Alexandra is whisking butter and sugar together deftly in a robin egg blue bowl. “Why did you want to come back to the family farm anyway? I thought you liked your life in the city. And you’ve barely even visited before this.”

Callie dumps a cup of flour into a different bowl. It puffs up in a white cloud, and she’s yanked back to that day alone in the doctor’s office, spotless walls and immaculate floor and furniture so bright it hurt to look at. His face had been grim, and she’d pinched hers together in a forced smile, as if that would have changed his.

She gives her head a shake now, trying to dislodge the memory that has melded itself to her brain like moss. “I wanted to get to know the place where you grew up.” The fibs have never fallen from her mouth so easily. “And I thought you could look for that bird you love so much, Grandma.”

“Alexandra,” corrects her grandmother. “We’ve been over this, Callie.”

Callie does remember. But the word had felt so lovely on her tongue, an intimate title that she wishes she’d used more often before now. “Right. Sorry.”

“And it’s called an ivory-billed woodpecker,” Alexandra continues. Her eyes light up, and for a flashing moment, Callie can see the young girl she’d once been, face bright with adventure. “It’s almost died out, did you know? Scientists are calling it functionally extinct.”

“What does that mean?”

“They’re still out there, but there are too few of them left to sustain the population, so it’s only a matter of time before they die out completely. There are probably only a couple left in the wild, give or take. Pity, isn’t it?”

She can’t help but notice the way Alexandra turns to the other side and cracks an egg loudly, the way her voice shakes like a too-high violin note. She knows her grandmother too well to be fooled. 

She’s lived with Alexandra ever since her mother—her only parent—died when she was a child. And for better or for worse, they’ve sharpened each other. Callie learned her favorite swear words from Alexandra’s impassioned speeches about sexism in the city, and when she fell and skinned her knee, it was her grandma who’d applied the cleaning solution to the scratch. It stung like thorns digging into the wound, and she’d cried a river, but once the pain faded, she felt something far warmer. She might have called it gratitude.

“Callie? You there?”

She flinches, and from her fingertips, salt waterfalls into the bowl. “Sorry, sorry,” she says, scrambling to salvage what she can. “Got stuck in my head for a little bit.”

Alexandra nudges her aside and scoops most of the excess salt back into the jar. “Silly girl,” she chides, but this time it’s definitely affectionate. “Anyways, I’ve always wanted to spot the ivory-billed woodpecker. We should go explore the farm later today, see if we can find it. Scientists are saying it’s functionally extinct, did you know?”

Callie’s breath catches. “Yeah, I do know.”

They fall into silence as they continue to work on the cookies. Callie’s mind is a traitor; every time she steers it away from red-zone thoughts, it returns to them like a stubborn horse to water, like a comet to a planet, seconds away from caving the earth in.

The truth is that Callie doesn’t want to ‘explore the farm,’ not by a long shot. Getting to know it would make it feel like her home. And it’s not. And it will never be. The farm belongs to her aunt and uncle, and the city belongs to Callie. Alexandra is the best of both worlds, the twining roots that tie them together.

Up until she was twenty, Alexandra had lived on this farm, taking care of the crops and the animals. Later, she’d moved to the city to attend a good school, and she’d never come back. Callie knows how much her grandmother likes the bustling life there, the energy that never seems to rest.

They’d come back to the farm in hopes of benefitting Alexandra’s health, both physical and spiritual: her childhood home, filled with rolling green fields and too much air for anyone to breathe. But when Callie looks at Alexandra’s face, washed over with a new sort of calm she’s never seen before, she feels nervous instead. Everything is changing, winter is dawning, and Alexandra’s rediscovered love for the farm feels like a ticking time bomb. How long until she settles down here for the rest of her years and swears off the city, the city that Callie can’t dream of moving away from?

How long until she leaves Callie behind?

Alexandra breaks the quiet with a clearing of her throat, her brow furrowed. “Do you remember how much lemon juice we need?”

Something catches in Callie’s throat. “Just a tablespoon and a half,” she manages, watching Alexandra nod in affirmation and begin squeezing the lemon.

She’s twenty-two, fresh out of college. Alexandra is seventy-six. Callie is supposed to be the one asking questions, the one dogging at the heels of her guardians about how the world works, how to pay taxes, how to dump someone without it getting messy. Yet she can feel the roles slowly reversing here, uncertainty creeping into Alexandra’s voice as the disease runs its course in her brain, reluctant surety making its way into Callie’s. She doesn’t want to be the rock here, she wants to be the breeze, free to caper and run wild.

Alzheimer’s, the doctor had said point-blank, his expression like stone. Callie recalls wondering how many other grandchildren he’d said it to that day, how many lives he had ripped into tiny frayed pieces with a single word. Her cognitive functions are beginning to fade. You’ll see it in little things first, like when she forgets names or loses objects. Later, she might...

His voice had grown muffled as if she was sinking to the bottom of a swimming pool, looking up at him through the water, his face all distorted and shifting with ribboned confusions of light. Callie’s heart had thudded unevenly in her chest like a box rolling downhill. This couldn’t be happening to her grandma, who had fled the farm and carved out her own brave life in the city, two hundred miles away from her home, at just nineteen years old. Alexandra was a warrior, a swordswoman who wielded courage and wit as her double-edged blades. No destiny had the right to steal them from her.

On some days, Alexandra remembers her diagnosis. Today, she does not.

Callie combines the two mixtures. Alexandra adds lemon and readies the baking sheet.

(Functional extinction. A few woodpeckers still may be alive, but the situation is too hopeless for them to thrive, to continue on. Soon, they’ll fade from the universe’s memory, left behind in the billowing stardust.)

Alexandra’s fingers still over the buttons of the oven, like she’s forgotten the temperature she used to know so well.

(Functional extinction.

It’s only a matter of time. 

And time, that stubborn beast, its stomach swollen with its endless feast on the changing of the seasons, will never wait for them. For anybody.)

Finally, Alexandra punches in the temperature and starts scooping the cookie dough onto the sheet. Callie watches her, countless questions beading on her tongue. For Alexandra, for the doctor, for whoever’s up there pulling the strings. Why did this happen? How much longer do I have with her?

“Does it snow here?” she asks.

“Sometimes,” answers Alexandra, shrugging. “It only happened twice when I was a child.”

Last year, she’d told Callie that it had happened thrice.

“It’s really beautiful, you know. The fields are quiet because the noisiest birds have migrated by then, and it gets so peaceful. The snow is so thick it looks like it might never melt.”

“That sounds a little scary.”

“Hm, I suppose. But Eleanor and I liked it. We played outside for…” She huffs a short, breathless laugh. “Five hours? Six? I don’t think I remember.”

“That’s okay,” Callie says, fighting back the sudden burning sensation in her eyes. “What was it like?”

Alexandra starts to rhapsodize about her childhood as she slides the sheet into the oven, and it feels a little like a punch to Callie’s gut. More questions pile up inside her. Do you like the country more than the city? How long are you going to stay here? What will we do when I have to go back? How can I ever live without you?

Gradually, her grandma’s words dwindle from a river to a creek, to a trickle. Then the drought takes that too, and they watch the sunrise together in silence, heralding the fact that they’re one day farther from summer, one day closer to the creeping frost.

Maybe the snow will never melt. Maybe it’ll lay there for the rest of time, languishing in its own white silence that it has created with its sweeping touch. While the other birds migrate, the woodpecker will curl up in its nest and wait out the cold, fear heavy in its heart at the familiar forest’s sudden disappearance. I wish the seasons didn’t have to change too, she thinks to the quaking bird, to a god she doesn’t know the name of. I wish this could be forever.

Too soon, though, the sun is up. The cookies are done. Their fragrance perfumes the air.

Alexandra looks away with something quiet in her eyes, a new presence, the absence of something. A brief flash of something crosses Callie’s mind. Can you feel your memories fading? Slipping away like birds in the winter, there one day and gone the next, flown to a home away from home that will never be home anyway?

She bites into a cookie and swallows hard, feeling its sour-sweet riot with the last blistering question in the back of her throat—too heavy to voice, too insistent to ignore. But she doesn’t think she’ll ever ask it. She’s a little afraid of the answer.

“This is really good, Grandma.”

Alexandra doesn’t correct her, just smiles, slow and soft. “I know.” She hesitates, then adds, “Are you up for looking for the woodpecker later? You know I’ve always wanted to see it.”

“Yeah. Sure.” Maybe this could be enough, these rushed moments, stolen words from the end of a story. 

It will have to be enough.

Callie puts her head on her grandmother’s shoulder and considers the future, the shadow of the winter over the pastoral farm, the woodpecker’s cry and its struggle to hold on to this fleeting life, hounded by the wind and the snow and the new silence of its home.

The lemon’s sweet bitterness is already beginning to fade from her tongue.