Her Seat at the Edge of Yesterday

Ardain Isma

CSMS Magazine

For Elise, winter was never merely a season. It was a mirror — a time when the cool air sharpened memory and coaxed distant years back into quiet focus. And of all the winters she carried within her, one always rose to the surface: a January afternoon long ago, when Port-au-Prince still shimmered with the innocence of a tropical paradise.

Back then, the 1950s city was a jewel — gingerbread houses perched on the hillsides, jacaranda blossoms drifting through narrow streets, and the sea throwing blue fire against the rocks at Carrefour. Carnival drums rehearsed in the distance, fishermen called to each other at dawn, and the city breathed with elegance, ease, and promise.

Elise was barely twenty when she met Jean-Michel. She remembered that morning clearly: the gentle heat, the scent of vetiver and sea salt, and the sun that lit the Boulevard Harry Truman like a theater stage. She had paused at a street vendor’s stand, adjusting the brim of her straw hat, when she noticed him — tall, composed, impeccably dressed in a cream linen suit despite the rising heat. His smile arrived first, warm and earnest. She returned it without thinking.

That smile changed everything.

Jean-Michel was an engineer, newly returned from France, full of ideas for a modern Haiti — wider boulevards, new bridges, clean water systems that would bring dignity to the hillsides. Elise was a librarian in training at the Lycée Pétion reading room, with a poet’s heart and a diplomat’s calm. Their paths might never have crossed again, but one soft “Bonjour, mademoiselle” became a conversation, and the conversation became an afternoon, and soon an entire season of young, confident love.

They built a life together — marriage, children, careers that carried them far from the Haiti they knew. Over the decades, as political storms swept through their homeland, Elise and Jean-Michel found peace in the quiet corners of Northeast Florida, particularly the village near World Golf. They cherished its ponds, the whispering pines, the gentle winters that felt like a tender echo of Haiti’s dry season.

But not all winters are soft. Age brought its own shadow, and Jean-Michel’s health declined faster than either expected. The frost of loss arrived quietly, taking with it the man who had once reshaped her world with a single smile on a sunny Haitian morning.

Now, each winter, Elise walks alone along the silvery ponds of World Golf. The brownish-green fairways, the river birch stretching pale branches toward the clouded sky — all of it reminds her of the delicate intersections of memory. The Florida winter is gentle, but it carries, for her, the ghost of Port-au-Prince: of a city once young, once full of music; of a boulevard where a linen-suited gentleman smiled at her as if destiny had whispered her name.

She sometimes sits on a bench overlooking the pond, the air cool against her bronze skin. The breeze is not the Caribbean one she knew, yet it brushes her cheek with the same soft insistence, as though delivering a message from another lifetime.

Memory may soften edges, rearrange colors, and blur timelines. But for Elise, one truth remains as steady as the season’s return:
a love sparked under Haiti’s sun can live through all winters.
It is the warmth within the gray — the smile that spans oceans and decades, connecting Port-au-Prince and Florida, youth and age, one life and the next.

Note: Ardain Isma is a university professor, novelist, essayist, and scholar. He serves as Chief Editor of CSMS Magazine and leads Village Care Publishing, an indie press dedicated to multicultural and social-justice-oriented literature. His works include Midnight at Noon, Bittersweet Memories of Last Spring, Last Spring Was Bittersweet, and The Cry of a Lone Bird, his latest novel exploring resilience, love, and the enduring quest for human dignity.