’78

First came trapping snow, closing both roads and schools.  I’m not sure about people working, shopping or any of that.  Everyone stayed in. There was fighting and boredom, books, board games and television. Feet and feet of snow, then small rain to melt things back.  The temperature dropped at dark just as quickly as the snow.

With the freezing wet, snow slid and dropped loud as thunder into great piles avalanched off a slate roof.  Some first floor windows in back allowed filtered light through the drifts and droppings next morning.

I rose early.  The yard was encrusted, glistening, sealed in the frozen remains of the night before.  Trees spouted like muddy fountains caught mid spray, the heaviest boughs brought to ground by the weight, stuck to earth in unnatural curls.

I’d beaten my siblings to the yard, the bird-less stillness broken only by grating plows scraping in the distance.  Our street was pretty deep. Nothing had  dented the surface of the little world of our driveway and yard.

Sliding slowly, skating really, I reached the plow furrow left at the roadside edge of the yard the day before.  Shallow breath pluming the air, I crossed the distance without breaking the crust.  My arms floated at my sides, balancing me, as if I were walking a tight rope.

Back at the porch door, I looked to see if there had been any spot, even small, where I’d broken the ice in my travel.  Nothing.  I’d heard creaks and groans, shifting my steps.

When the other kids came out, they stomped shapes and words into the snow and ice. They rolled in great looping arcs and up-ended sheets of ice large as they could lift, only to push them aside and scatter them to slush.

The sun warmed the earth and the icicles grew from eaves.  Within hours, our yard grew chaotic, like a dot-to-dot puzzle of a rain cloud.

More storms came as years passed in that house, but never one quite so bad.  By the next big one, I was far too heavy to leave no mark on the slick surface of the world, and too old to try.