“My name is Viola Marie Varenne. I am forty-one years old. I am five feet, seven inches tall. . . . It is not proper to begin a story this way, I realize, to supply all of the basic facts up front. I have read English literature since I was a child. To start a story like this, it simply is not done. And yet, I am here, writing these things down, describing myself to you.”

My name is Viola Marie Varenne. I am forty-one years old. I am five feet, seven inches tall. I weigh one hundred thirty-six pounds. I have very pale skin, combination-type I am told, with some light freckles and a few moles, including one especially plump pink one on the temple next to my left eye. My address is 423 Maple Street in the town of Iona, deep in the middle of farm country—the heartland, as some call it. I teach English literature at the Iona high-school. It is the same high-school I attended myself and from where I graduated. The Iona hospital, now rebuilt on the edge of the town, is where I was born. I have lived my entire life here.

Also: I attend Saint Cecilia’s Catholic church, where I was baptized and had my catechism. I like to garden; I have a small rectangular bed for vegetables in the back yard and plots of flowers about the lawn. I listen to classical music on the public radio station, and I used to play the piano—it still sits in the dining room, black, upright, against the wall facing the window and, through the window, there is a great willow tree, which was part of the reason why I bought this house, that and the three fully grown apple trees in the back. There, now you know just about everything there is to know about me.

It is not proper to begin a story this way, I realize, to supply all of the basic facts up front. I have read English literature since I was a child. To start a story like this, it simply is not done. And yet, I am here, writing these things down, describing myself to you. My hair is nearly black, coarse, wavy, and long, down to my hips almost, so I pull it back in a long braid that runs down my back like a second, dark external vertebrae.

My eyes are blue. They are so pale and cool a blue that I think they startle people sometimes. I am quite certain that I am startling to some people generally, if not just incomprehensible to most. Since my mother died, I have lived alone, not in her house but in another that I bought with a portion of the small inheritance. I have preserved her house, too; it sits exactly ten blocks away from my own. Occasionally I rent it out to people who come to town for this or that. I keep some beds of flowers there, too, little memorials to her, I suppose, and I store extra canned goods in her cellar during the winter months when the earth is cold and hard and fruits and vegetables cannot be grown.

I am not fanciful. For classes, I dress mostly in white cotton shirts and black skirts and pants. In the winter, I don sweaters and I have some dresses that I put on for church in all seasons. Apart from my mother’s wedding ring, which I wear on my right hand, and occasionally her strand of pearls, I do not put on much jewelry. Her other pieces, heavily jeweled costume brooches and clip-on earrings mostly, sit in her silk-covered boxes at her house, where she left them. I don’t wear makeup either, I use just cold cream for my face to keep it from cracking in the incredible weather we have here in Iona. I put on sunscreen in the summer months. I have not seen the need for any further adornment.

It is early January as I write this. The holidays are done, but there are still two weeks before the new semester begins. I have baked various breads over this time, have just, in fact, taken a banana bread out of the oven. I sit at the dining-room table, the piano behind me, the wall of windows in front of me, and the pink-marbled notebook split open on the table’s oak top. It’s the book I’ve started to use to record my thoughts—a new year’s resolution. Outside, there is a fresh snow from an overnight storm so the bright room is brighter still, is blank, uncompromising in its lack.

Outside, the lawn is covered in cascading drifts of snow. One slants up to the house, nearly to the windows, probably six feet high in certain places, I would gander. The tree branches and the clothesline are glazed with ice. Their shadows cast delicate lines on the snow like long graphite sketches on paper. My Airedale terrier, Ambrose, loves the snow. I let him outside where he pounces on the fleecy mounds, tearing up, in places, the beautiful purity of the soft powder so gently lain by the sky, by whatever it is in the sky, clouds or some such, that gives us the snow.