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Because of Patrick and Rachel, I do not have to modify the phrase to make it singular: "the winter of my discontent." Truly, it is the winter of our collective discontent, though Patrick and Rachel try to hide it and though at the end of it they will receive a reward to compensate for the trouble of wintering me. It is a winter barely begun, for I have been here only four weeks. By the calendar, a week into November, it is shy of literal winter by six weeks. "Short winters" is a description misapplied to Mississippi by those who know nothing of the South. We natives know how long these short winters can be.

A cantankerous old woman is never so annoying as when she is in some way related to you, and if you are strapped with her, overseer of her care, recipient of her complaints, then she may be a burden past telling. I know this. Before I lived here, before I myself qualified as a burden, I knew this, for I was my mother's keeper for five months before she died of irritability, a condition that had started in her bowel years earlier but metastasized to her mind and behavior by the end. Throughout my life I have been told that I am like my mother in many ways except in looks. My mother was a great beauty in her youth.

A difficult old woman may be entertaining if you are not responsible for her upkeep. Such a termagant lived in my mother's boardinghouse when I was a child. I used to delight in Mrs. Beadle's nasty temper, the tactless things she said about the meals my mother prepared, the way she upbraided the postman, whom she accused of withholding letters from her and whom she regularly threatened to sue in a court of law.

Used by permission of Bethany House, a division of Baker Publishing Group, copyright 2006. All rights to this material are reserved. Materials are not to be distributed to other web locations for retrieval, published in other media, or mirrored at other sites without written permission from Baker Publishing Group.

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Winter Birds is available from ChristianBook.com and other retailers.

The rest of chapter 1 can be viewed at Bethany House's Winter Birds section.

The book won an award of merit in the fiction category of Christianity Today's 2007 book awards.

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May (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51