There were those thickets of flat graying trees and a frozen skin of lake out by the hunched rink behind Georgian Woods the terrace apartments where Dad lived after he left the family.
Left to my own devices while Dad delved in books I slipped out the sliding door through the frost-grass and the snow branch gap into the unfolding stillness of the drowsing park. Sometimes my sister was there with me in the woods, our play always some form of running away.
In the early years Dad smoked a pipe his thick blue rug scented with Captain Black **** tobacco, the white tin with the rigged ship logo. The humming silo of the air purifier Dad's concession to my convulsing asthmatic chest, close-gathered lung
like the branch bark that scraped my lip as I ran in the park wood, blood slipping across my face and down into the ache.