Snowed In
1
"It'll be fun!"
Those were my mom's words. It'll be fun!
At the time, I'd thought so too.
Her idea of fun was to pack up her divorced middle-aged life and move up north. Way up north. Where
winters are cold, snow and ice exist in abundance, and my dad could become a distant memory.
Not that I blamed her for wanting to get away from it all. Dad recently announced that he planned to
remarry, and I'm not exactly thrilled with the prospect of having a stepmother. Marsha isn't wicked or
anything. Actually she asked me to be one of her bridesmaids, but I told her that I needed to think about
it. I've never been a bridesmaid before, and I'm not sure I want my first time to be at my dad's wedding.
Because it's totally weird thinking of him with a wife who isn't my mom. And okay, I resent that he's
going to marry someone else. It feels like he's not only betraying Mom, but betraying me.
So when Mom told me she wanted to move and asked, "What do you think?" I replied, "Let's do it!"
Of course, that was before I was standing in the front parlor of our new digs, shivering, with my parka
zipped up tightly and my gloved hands tucked beneath my arms, searching for a little extra warmth.
It was, like, negative one thousand degrees outside. You think I'm exaggerating, but Mom's idea of fun
included moving to an island on the Great Lakes-in the middle of winter, when the surrounding water
was starting to freeze. It was that cold. Although cold doesn't adequately describe it. It was much, much
colder than cold.
I was going to have to pull out my thesaurus and learn a whole list of adjectives for cold.
We'd flown into the small airport about an hour earlier. Our luggage had been loaded onto a taxi, only
this taxi was a wagon with runners instead of wheels, because, oh, yeah, the island is covered in mounds
of white glistening snow.
I'd actually been excited when Mom mentioned the snow, because arcticlike weather was a totally new
experience for me. I've spent most of my seventeen years living in north Texas. When it snows half an
inch, schools and businesses shut down, and the local news interrupts the regularly scheduled
programming to provide up-to-the-minute progress reports on the trucks dumping sand on the
expressways. The reporters stand on overpasses explaining that it's really cold, while showing footage of
fishtailing vehicles, people slipping (yes, falling down on icy streets is newsworthy in north Texas), and
children sliding down hills on baking sheets because we don't, as a rule, invest money in sleds.
I'm pretty certain that kids here have sleds, and that the news isn't going to include roving reporters
asking people how they'll deal with the half inch of snow forecast to arrive by nightfall. Here snow is
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