What to Look for in Winter

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One of the last things my mother gave me was a paper umbrella; it must have been from Japan. Its wooden spars were webbed with an oily paper that smelled of pine resin and fish. When you put the umbrella up, the paper separated from itself with a faint disgustingness of sound, unidentifiable as yet to a child of eight, that would later reveal itself to be that of flesh separating from flesh or the frozen surface of a lake beginning to shiver apart.

My paper umbrella was of little use in Edinburgh, a city with some call for the kind of umbrella that keeps off not the glare of the sun but the fall of the rain. Nonetheless, I loved it. My mother was a woman with too many superstitions, a trait I have inherited, so she didn’t like the umbrella to be put up inside the house. I didn’t want to upset her, so I would stand just outside the house, on the stone step, under my orange paper umbrella, whirling it and looking up through its oily sections, listening to the seagulls mewing over our street.

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