Free The Elegant Gathering of White Snows by Kris Radish

and I have spent a thousand nights staring into space, wondering if I would ever feel the power of my own healing.
    Once I read somewhere that the agonies of life never disappear. The pain may splinter, and parts of it might dissolve but the anger and the struggle always remain inside of us. In some cases, we can never get rid of it. A few people even learn how to treasure the traumatic experience that has settled inside of them.
    That is a powerful thing, I think, and maybe what has happened to me. The simple telling of my trauma—to my sisters here—has seemed to set me free in a way that I never thought possible. I imagine when I tell my daughters and my husband, I will become even more empowered than I could ever have dreamed.
    Then too I have come to know because of these walking women, that I need to be an example for my own daughters. How different my life would have been, Chris told me, if my own mother had risen up with a whip in her hand to defend me and to right the wrongs. These steps along the highway are giving me back something powerful that was taken away from me a long time ago. I know with all my heart that I must pass this power on to my own beautiful girls.
    Another thing that I know is that Tim will take me in his arms and engulf me with his love just as he always has. Somehow I finally feel confident that when I do tell him, he will not shrink away from me or even be angry. I have been lucky to have him love me all these years, and that has been the single gift that has kept me moving ahead, slowly at times, but I have at least moved.
    I know that I must go back to my mother, too. She has never been able to look me in the eye all these years and it is only now that I realize her life must have been filled with anguish and loss and anger too. I know she loved me. When this walk is over, I'm pretty sure I will be able to go to her and tell her that I forgive her. I will try.
    I will try to forgive her for everything and everyone that she could not control. Forgive her for being able to hold me for only an hour or so in my tiny single bed that rocked and swayed with her own well of tears. Forgive her for all the long nights when she sat on one side of the upstairs bedroom, and I sat on the other, both of us so alone, so sad, and so scared. Forgive her for what she could not do to make my life sweet again.
    But first, before I go back to them all, there is this walking that seems to be lifting up the very soul that holds my bones together. I have to be careful these days not to wish myself swept away into the eternities on this wave of happiness. I need to go back to my two daughters, my mother, my Tim and finish this incredible journey.

 
    C HAPTER T HREE
     
    I T WAS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to get Alice out of Lenny Sorensen's bathtub. “Girls!” shouted Alice, who left the bathroom door open so she could talk to the other women. “This is wonderful, I haven't felt anything this wonderful, well,” she said, stumbling over her own words, “well, just never mind.”
    Everyone else was sitting around Lenny's house wrapped up in a towel or an old bathrobe or one of the few oversized shirts of Jackson's that Lenny hadn't thrown into the hog pen. Lenny had ushered them into the house, pointed them toward the refrigerator and bathroom, and then had ordered them to strip so she could wash their clothes.
    “My God!” shouted Sandy, as she waltzed through the kitchen sipping wine in a red towel that barely covered her rear end. “This is about the most hilarious thing I have ever seen in my life. Lenny, go put a towel on, you're overdressed.”
    Lenny didn't say much as she gathered up underwear and socks to throw into the old green washing machine at the back of the kitchen. She was surprised that she didn't know any of the women who had marched through her yard and into her life, but she told herself that was most likely because she had spent way too much time feeding pigs and driving a tractor instead of