The Leap — Vocabulary
Louise Erdrich
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It can rekindle, and my father, forgetful around the house and perpetually exhausted from night hours on call, often emptied what he thought were ashes from cold stoves into wooden or cardboard containers.†

They made a romantic pair all right, especially in the blindfold sequence.†

In surprise, he complied.†

When extremes of temperature collide, a hot and cold front, winds generate instantaneously behind a hill and crash upon you without warning.†

Flames had pierced one side wall, and the glare of the fire lighted the massive limbs and trunk of the vigorous old elm that had probably been planted the year the house was built, a hundred years ago at least.†

It commemorates the disaster that put our town smack on the front page of the Boston and New York tabloids.

She was illiterate.†

When extremes of temperature collide, a hot and cold front, winds generate instantaneously behind a hill and crash upon you without warning.†

In the town square a replica tent pole, cracked and splintered, now stands cast in concrete.†

They rubbed their hands in chalky powder, then Harry launched himself and swung, once, twice, in huge calibrated beats across space.†

It was while the two were in midair, their hands about to meet, that lightning struck the main pole and sizzled down the guy wires, filling the air with a blue radiance that Harry Avalon must certainly have seen through the cloth of his blindfold as the tent buckled and the edifice toppled him forward, the swing continuing and not returning in its sweep, and Harry going down, down into the crowd with his last thought, perhaps, just a prickle of surprise at his empty hands.†

My mother is the surviving half of a blindfold trapeze act, not a fact I think about much even now that she is sightless, the result of encroaching and stubborn cataracts.

Three people died, but except for her hands my mother was not seriously harmed until an overeager rescuer broke her arm in extricating her and also, in the process, collapsed a portion of the tent bearing a huge buckle that knocked her unconscious.†

The fire could have started from a flaming box, or perhaps a buildup of creosote inside the chimney was the culprit.†

She is one with the constant dark now, just as the air was her home, familiar to her, safe, before the storm that afternoon.†

Flames had pierced one side wall, and the glare of the fire lighted the massive limbs and trunk of the vigorous old elm that had probably been planted the year the house was built, a hundred years ago at least.†