After the March Blizzard

I stand in line at the post office while sunshine unbuttons coats, loosens scarves, thins ice above currents of longing. The two-year-old circles my legs, the newborn strapped to my chest, frog-legged, as I clutch paperwork for passports so we can board a plane destined for Paris, attend a godchild’s baptism, walk the Breton shoreline, allow me to catch my breath far from these floor to ceiling windows now flooding the space with too much light, droplets tracking my exposed neck, hair cropped in the wake of my mother’s death. Finally, the clerk waves us to the counter, scans my birth certificate, says: It’s not enough. I examine the notary signature, its embossed seal, fail to see the defect.

It was signed seven years after you were born.

My birth mother dragged her feet, I explain, before she gave me to her sister.

It’s a story I don’t want to tell, contours jagged, margins unclear, plus, it isn’t mine, is it?

The clerk looks beyond my ravaged hair, pink cheeks, rill of perspiration.

We need the court order.

I hear chatter from the queue, impatience and laughter at my attempt to argue with the US Postal Service, and I think about my mother and her sister, fierce women I loved, whose choices carry me like a spring tide to this moment, and tomorrow when I’ll pack my daughters into the car, drive to a building a county away, park, pay, hope the document is found in its dusty file, then return here to face another line, this clerk. Amusement builds and I turn to glare, find only delighted faces fixed on my resourceful child, every stitch of her clothing discarded, wading in this gene pool only because of women with perfectly imperfect timing who once felt heat beneath a March sun.

Look, Mama. Look at me!

DIANA DINVERNO

Diana Dinverno’s work received a nomination for Sundress Publication’s Best of the Net in 2020, and has appeared in Panoply, Orange Blossom Review, The MacGuffin, and other literary journals. She practices law and writing in Michigan. Read more at dianadinverno.com.