What Miss Addie Remembers

First published in Hillfire Anthology, Vol. 1
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If you ask her, Miss Addie will be happy to tell you about the very last time it snowed in Denver. It happened in March, which was common, and the flakes came down fat and heavy, which was not. Miss Addie will close her eyes and turn her freckles sunward and conjure the memory for you: what the air smelled like when the temperature dropped, what time it was when the snow began to fall, how it never seemed to get dark that night because the snow reflected all the lights of the city back up to the low-slung clouds. She will tell you how quiet the world went. How she wriggled out of her sleeping bag, unzipped her tent, and stepped out from beneath the highway overpass to hold her tongue out and let the flakes melt there.

That was twenty-six years ago.

Sure, everyone who was here for the last snow can remember it, but only in the barest sense of the word. Just like, sure, you remember your fifth birthday party, but only because you’ve seen the photos and heard your mother talk about it enough times to draw a picture in your mind. But everyone agrees that Miss Addie has the best memory of the day, the definitive memory. This is because, as she says, “I knew the last time was comin’, even when I was little. It was already so rare. And you can’t take the rare things in life for granted, you know?”

Miss Addie comes on TV every so often, usually around Christmas, and the networks have her tell the story of the last snow. Some reporter will find where she’s pitched up and interview her from the side of the road. Wherever she is, however rough she looks, she tells the story with joy, with relish. People make memes of her online, pictures or videos cutting together the phrases and mannerisms that color every one of her retellings—the deep breath with closed eyes, the pa, pa, pa to imitate the fat flakes hitting a nearby tarp, her little motto that always comes with a sly smile: “Everything we do is for the last time … until the next time.”

As something of a household name, Miss Addie gets special treatment. There is a sense, throughout the city, that people ought to look out for her. She is the keeper of a precious memory; she is handled gently. Yes, there are videos from the day of the last snow, there are pictures and anecdotes, but nothing can beat the five-sense experience Miss Addie provides when she holds out her hand and you can see how she really feels that snowflake landing softly on her palm. So people try to take care of her. Nothing unreasonable—a dollar here or there, folks won’t call the cops on her if she’s camped near their property, goodwill like that. Some people in community message boards even reported seeing her set up in the middle of Civic Center Park for a couple weeks, and when she was finally escorted out of the park it was in a wheelchair and not at the end of a nightstick. Her knee’s bad these days, apparently. Someone heard it’s arthritis, someone else heard she got caught at the wrong end of a sweep truck.

But lately, people haven’t heard from her at all.

Message boards have lit up for a few months asking has anyone seen Miss Addie, is she okay, how can we help her. It’s early fall now, so the cold isn’t a concern yet, but the smoke is. The fires usually burn from May through to Halloween—if not uphill in the Rockies then over on the West Coast, where the smoke still drifts over to blanket Denver in a choking haze. For days at a time it’s not safe to be outside. Most folks lock themselves at home with their air purifiers and cooling systems, and when they have to go out, to walk their dogs or get groceries, they wear masks to filter out the worst of it. When the air quality reaches a certain level the shelters will change their rules so that the unhoused can stay inside all day—it could be Miss Addie has just been hunkered down in a shelter and nobody has cared to mention that they’ve seen her. But it could also be worse than that. Try not to think about it too much.

Forecasters are saying that the air quality should clear up soon, hopefully this time for at least a month. When that happens, when the LED lights on the particulate alert boards switch back to green, Denver will step cautiously outside again. The people with homes will walk to the park or take bike rides down to the reservoir. The people without will be waved away from the shelters and disperse to the few corners of the city where they are able to exist unchallenged. And maybe Miss Addie will toddle down the street with that beneficent smile on her face and rest on her favorite bench in Civic Center Park. Passersby, relieved, will tell her they’ve missed her and hand her a dollar or a croissant. When she’s not busy telling the kids who’ve never made it up into the cooler mountains what it sounds like to walk on packed snow (“It’s a squeak, kinda like rubber”) then she may be sitting in perfect stillness on the bench with her eyes closed and her face lifted full-on to the beating sun.

And you may stop to ask her if she’s doing it right now, if she’s committing another day to memory.

“Oh, yes,” she’ll say, her eyes still closed.

But what is she trying to remember?

She’ll take a deep breath in through her nose and sigh, her smile slackening. “There’s no smoke in the sky today. No fires burning. Might be the last time that ever happens. I want to remember it, as best I can.”

Whether this makes you laugh or cry, you won’t want to believe it. That days like these, the normal ones, could go just as extinct as the Cassin’s finch or the monarch butterfly or the snow. So you might walk on, shake your head, and try to forget with just as much force as Miss Addie is trying to remember.

Or you might sit down next to her and close your own eyes. Feel the sun on your skin. Breathe the clean air. Listen for birdsong, but all you can hear is hundreds of cars trying to get somewhere.