This story began with the vernal equinox — the first day of spring, when day and night stand in perfect balance before the world finally begins leaning toward the light again.
There’s always been something quietly haunting about the equinox to me. It feels less like a celebration and more like a threshold. A suspended moment between endings and beginnings, darkness and renewal, winter and survival. The world pauses there briefly, perfectly divided, before continuing its inevitable turn.
Every vernal equinox, I stand an egg on end because I was taught that when darkness and light are held in perfect balance, the egg will balance too. I’ve done it for nearly sixty years now, and over time the ritual itself has become part of what the equinox means to me — a fragile moment of stillness before the world tips again.
Mary entered my mind from that feeling.
I wanted to write about someone whose life never quite arrives at the promise other people keep insisting exists just beyond the horizon. I met Mary long ago, had a brief acquaintance with her and learned her story from her brother. She has stayed with me, haunted my thoughts, for decades. Her story is heartbreaking, so grab the tissues for this one. She is someone who survives long enough to see spring come again and again, but who never fully escapes the shadow winter left inside her. Mary became, for me, a woman standing permanently at the equinox itself — balanced between hope and despair, tenderness and ruin, endurance and surrender.
The title, Equal Dark, came from the realization that even at the return of spring, darkness still holds equal ground for one brief moment. Light has not won yet. The thaw has begun, but the cold remains in the soil. That felt deeply true to Mary’s life and to the emotional landscape of the story itself.
I also wanted the setting to carry the unmistakable feeling of early Michigan spring: dirty snow collapsing along the roadsides, frozen ground softening beneath gray rain, bare branches trembling with the first signs of green, and the strange emotional tension that comes when the season changes before the heart is ready to follow it.
At its heart, this story became about survival without triumph. About the people who continue walking forward despite carrying a life marked by sorrow, disappointment, and repeated loss. And about the fragile, stubborn possibility that balance itself — however temporary — might still contain its own kind of grace.