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    Winter Run: Stories of an Enchanted Boyhood in a Lost Time and Place

    Winter Run: Stories of an Enchanted Boyhood in a Lost Time and Place

    by Robert Ashcom

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      ISBN-13: 9781565129122
    • Publisher: Workman Publishing Company, Inc.
    • Publication date: 10/14/2002
    • Sold by: Barnes & Noble
    • Format: eBook
    • Pages: 240
    • Sales rank: 253,232
    • File size: 2 MB

    Robert Ashcom was raised in Albemarle County, Virginia. A graduate of Brown University, he has taught school, bred and raised thoroughbred horses, and served as a master of hounds and huntsman to the Tryon Hounds in Tryon, North Carolina. He is the author of Lost Hound, a nonfiction collection, and his prose and poetry have appeared in a variety of journals. He and his wife, Susan, now live on a farm near Warrenton, Virginia.

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    Prologue

    Gretchen's Arms

    It was a dark day. Water glistened black on the sidewalks. The naked branches of the trees lining the street hung overhead like webbed fingers on crooked arms. Another two degrees and it would all be frozen. Everything was close, everything held tight, bare hands clenched in pockets.

    There were new buildings and a lot of construction around the hospital. But I couldn't mistake the smell once I walked through the doors. The color-coded lines on the walls were supposed to guide me to my destination. They didn't make any sense. Finally a nurse gave up explaining and just took me to the ward.

    And there she was. I would hardly have recognized her. The disease had taken her away. Who would have ever thought that so much flesh was necessary to make a face. Hers was gone. Skin stretched taut over the bones that everyone said were the source of her beauty. Bones. People had talked about them. She was unmistakably Scandinavian. In youth her creamy white blond hair had fallen to her shoulders. She wore it that way even after it turned silver. She had been tall, willowy, with slender arms. Arms always waiting for me, reaching out to take me back. But not now. It was too late. This time I was sure. Her rings were gone. They had looked foreign on her long, tapered fingers, anyway.

    I watched her. Her cool slate-gray eyes were closed, her breath rising and falling, the kind of breathing you do when you are in pain. Tubes. The whole nine yards.

    All my life I called her Gretchen except in loaded moments. Then she became Mother-the Swedish orphan, raised by friends after her parents both died of cancer within a single year. The friends were Catholic and strict. Gretchen was expected to understand the doctrine of the Trinity. But she never had. How could one thing be three? Or the other way around? She was defiant. And so for the rest of her life she received the sacrament in her left hand although she was right-handed.

    "Hello Mother." Her body shifted slightly.

    Then the idiot question: "How are you?"

    "Fine."

    What do you say to the already as-good-as-dead-to one whose rings and bracelets have been removed? I put my hand on her wrist. It was cold and very small.

    "I am here. Is there anything I can do for you?"

    "No thank you." In clear English.

    There followed two days of tension and suspense, arguments with doctors about pain medication, about the chances of her coming back. I knew she wouldn't, not looking like that. She knew how she looked.

    I had to leave for a few days. I told her what I was doing. She came up from wherever it was she was and said, "Before you go, make a list of your choices and put it on the chair. I never approved of them-but put it on the chair." Then she went away again.

    My choices? My choices? What do you mean?

    I couldn't breathe. It was like suffocation from the dust around a grain bag when it is being filled. The dust is like ether and the world

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    This novel of a boyhood in 1940s Virginia offers “a graceful, compassionate ode to farm life in a bygone era” (Publishers Weekly).
     
    Charlie Lewis is the only child of metropolitan parents who, after World War II, decide to move to the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains and live on a “gentleman’s farm” near Charlottesville. Just six years old when his family settles in to their new life, Charlie discovers his personal version of heaven.
     
    Charlie has a natural—almost supernatural—affinity for the land and its animals. His encounters with an ancient, half-blind mule, a boar hog and his harem, a mother fox, and four domestic dogs gone wild educate and intrigue him—and lead him to contemplate the mysteries of their Maker. Wanting to learn all he can, he instinctively turns to a group of older black men, some of whom work the farm, others who are neighbors. Jim Crow laws are still very much evident, but Charlie’s passions endear him to these men, who understand that he is lonely even if he does not. They watch out for him, and more—they love him.
     
    Capturing the innocence and wonder of childhood, Winter Run is “a very sweet, almost mystical tale of a boy who was amazed by what nature brought him, his growing up, and his understanding that all things, even life as he knows it, are passing” (Booklist).

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