A Violet Season by Kathy Leonard Czepiel

William. Sometimes she worried he might not come home.
    She poured her sweet blueberry filling into the waiting piecrust and rolled out a second plate of dough to cover it, then fluted the edges with her thumbs and pricked holes in the top with the tip of her knife. By the time the others arrived home for supper, the aroma of pie had filled the house. At the table, when Frank asked about it, she took the chance to tease him. “Do you recall what day it is?”
    “Monday,” he said gruffly.
    “It’s the anniversary of our wedding. Twenty-three years,” Ida said, and Frank nodded. “After dinner, I thought you and I could take a walk.” Frank didn’t say yes or no, but after the dishes were cleared and the pie was set before him, his face softened, and he caught her arms and kissed her quickly in front of the children. She imagined she felt again that fierce devotion in the firmness of his grip.
    “I’ll clean up and watch the babies,” Alice offered.
    Ida changed into Oliver’s old boots, and Frank put on his hat, and they set off on an evening walk. “Let’s go up Halfway Hill,” she suggested.
    They climbed the lane toward the Mortons’ farm, then continued to the low ridge, pausing to admire the river when it came in view, throwing thousands of sparks of light from its surface. One of the old sloops sailed languidly along the far shore, its sails barely catching a breeze.
    A hundred yards over the ridge, the path up Halfway Hill cut off to the left, and they took it with long strides, Ida holding her skirts out of the dust as they pushed their way up the first fifty steep feet. Then they settled into the gentler curve of the path as it wound around the shaded east side of the hill, followed by another steep climb over some natural granite steps. After ten minutes of silent walking, they reached the majestic top of the hill, where a bold farmer had once planted a field of corn that now was a meadow of swishing timothy grass accented by Queen Anne’s lace and chicory, buttercups and thistles, and that favorite old oak tree, which Frank said his father’s father had remembered climbing as a boy.
    From up here, the true breadth of the river could be seen. It commanded the landscape at this, its widest stretch. Despite the advent of the railroad, the river was a busy corridor of commerce, and they counted no fewer than half a dozen schooners, three barges, one with a tug, and a steamboat, though not the Mary Powell, plowing its waters in both directions. Someone was also fighting his way across in a canoe, a crazy undertaking amid the north-and-south traffic.
    To the south, the Rondout Lighthouse would soon be lit. Behind it lay the hills and farms and villages of Ulster County, and behind them the curved backbone of the Catskills, with the distinctive chin of Overlook Mountain turned to the evening sky. Frank stepped to the edge of the slope and smoothed some of the tall grass with his foot, then sat and raised his arm for Ida to sit beside him. She leaned against him and pressed her hand into the coarse, moist grass.
    “I’d marry you again,” she said after a time, and she felt a piercing tenderness for him. She brushed her nose in his hair. He smelled of a long day of work.
    He stripped the seeds off a stalk of grass and threw them with some force over the hill. She waited, hoping he would say something in return, but he glared out at the landscape, as if it were to blame for something.
    “Now that Norris is of age . . .” she started, but she dropped the rest of her sentence, unsure how to go on without provoking him.
    “That boy is a fool,” Frank said.
    “All boys that age have a fool in them,” Ida said. “They all need to learn the hard way, but they do learn, most of them.”
    “He’s more of a fool than most.”
    “He’s been indulged,” Ida said.
    Frank threw another pinch of grass seed. The steamboat on the river whistled in response to some danger they couldn’t see.
    “Perhaps