And has been for years and cares not for the ways I remember him, or remember remembering him We didn't question. Or complain. It wouldn’t have occurred to us, and it wouldn’t have helped. I was eight. Julie was ten.
We didn’t know yet that this blizzard would earn itself a moniker that would be silk-screened on T-shirts. We would own such a shirt, which extended its tenure in our house as a rag for polishing silver.
So I didn’t make up the blizzard, though it sounds made up, the grimmest of Grimms, windchill forty below, three feet of snow and snow still falling. You had to shovel your drive daily. Later, a neighbor would tell of coming home after two nights away and having to dig down a foot to reach his own keyhole.
My dad had a snow blower, …show more content…
The airports, which was bad because Mom was in Toronto, visiting her sister. The schools, which was great for the first day, and good for the second, and then less good and less good yet. Because the roads were impossible; the fridge, emptying. Does this smell OK to you? Couldn’t watch Little House because Channel 5 covered the blizzard all day. A motorist, dead of exposure in a stranded car. A man, dead of a heart attack while shoveling snow; ambulance couldn’t reach him. Coat drive, shelters for the homeless. Check in on your elderly neighbors, folks. If you can get out, that is. Amtrak trains abandoned. Hundreds of cars lining the highway, buried by snow, white lumps pierced by antennas. Family of five, killed when their roof collapsed. We were a family of four, but with Mom far away, we were only three. I got out of the bathtub to answer her crackling long-distance …show more content…
I knew now that white hurt worse than red. Where was everybody? Elderly couple, found in their basement, dead of hypothermia. Fourteen-year-old boy, poisoned by carbon monoxide as he sat in a running car his dad was trying to dig out from a snow bank. Another shoveler’s heart attack. Volunteers with snowmobiles taking doctors to hospitals.
Every part of my body was scalding cold, but one part scalded coldest: my neck, my plump child’s neck. The wind was wily, cupping my lowered chin and arrowing along the inch of skin before my parka’s zipper. The wind, like a squirrel wielding knives. How much farther? I tried to step where my father was stepping. I tried to use his body as a shield. Family of three or four, frozen dead on the road, hadn’t even gone to mass. It was a sin to skip mass. If you were a sinner when you died, you went to hell.
Finally, I did it, the thing I’d been contemplating for the last half mile. I shouted at my dad’s back, asking for his scarf. I didn’t want to ask. I wasn’t a child who asked. And I knew he must be cold, too. Yet I asked, and when I did, he turned, already unwrapping his red-and-black striped scarf. He squatted and tied it around my neck, he wound it once, he wound it twice, he wound it three times, he smiled at me, his handsome Black Irish smile, and behind his scarf, which covered my neck all the way to the tip of my nose, I smiled, too. And thought I might make it, after
We didn’t know yet that this blizzard would earn itself a moniker that would be silk-screened on T-shirts. We would own such a shirt, which extended its tenure in our house as a rag for polishing silver.
So I didn’t make up the blizzard, though it sounds made up, the grimmest of Grimms, windchill forty below, three feet of snow and snow still falling. You had to shovel your drive daily. Later, a neighbor would tell of coming home after two nights away and having to dig down a foot to reach his own keyhole.
My dad had a snow blower, …show more content…
The airports, which was bad because Mom was in Toronto, visiting her sister. The schools, which was great for the first day, and good for the second, and then less good and less good yet. Because the roads were impossible; the fridge, emptying. Does this smell OK to you? Couldn’t watch Little House because Channel 5 covered the blizzard all day. A motorist, dead of exposure in a stranded car. A man, dead of a heart attack while shoveling snow; ambulance couldn’t reach him. Coat drive, shelters for the homeless. Check in on your elderly neighbors, folks. If you can get out, that is. Amtrak trains abandoned. Hundreds of cars lining the highway, buried by snow, white lumps pierced by antennas. Family of five, killed when their roof collapsed. We were a family of four, but with Mom far away, we were only three. I got out of the bathtub to answer her crackling long-distance …show more content…
I knew now that white hurt worse than red. Where was everybody? Elderly couple, found in their basement, dead of hypothermia. Fourteen-year-old boy, poisoned by carbon monoxide as he sat in a running car his dad was trying to dig out from a snow bank. Another shoveler’s heart attack. Volunteers with snowmobiles taking doctors to hospitals.
Every part of my body was scalding cold, but one part scalded coldest: my neck, my plump child’s neck. The wind was wily, cupping my lowered chin and arrowing along the inch of skin before my parka’s zipper. The wind, like a squirrel wielding knives. How much farther? I tried to step where my father was stepping. I tried to use his body as a shield. Family of three or four, frozen dead on the road, hadn’t even gone to mass. It was a sin to skip mass. If you were a sinner when you died, you went to hell.
Finally, I did it, the thing I’d been contemplating for the last half mile. I shouted at my dad’s back, asking for his scarf. I didn’t want to ask. I wasn’t a child who asked. And I knew he must be cold, too. Yet I asked, and when I did, he turned, already unwrapping his red-and-black striped scarf. He squatted and tied it around my neck, he wound it once, he wound it twice, he wound it three times, he smiled at me, his handsome Black Irish smile, and behind his scarf, which covered my neck all the way to the tip of my nose, I smiled, too. And thought I might make it, after