Snow

When the new man in my life said he liked skiing naked on remote stretches of the Northern California mountains, I thought he was kidding. Now here I am with him, learning to cross-country ski sans clothing.

We are all alone — at least, I hope so. Despite enjoying the rear view of his naked body skiing confidently ahead of me, I can’t help keeping an eye out for other skiers. It appears we have the mountain all to ourselves, just as he said we would. But I’m still too modest to strip all the way down, so I’ve taken off just my shirt.

Our goal for the afternoon is to gain as much altitude as possible before we turn around and ski to the bottom. The trip is two hours up, twenty minutes down, or so he tells me. The high-mountain sun shines relentlessly on the exposed parts of my body. I have to keep stopping to drink water and put on more sunscreen. This new man is patient, waiting silently while I take my breaks. Occasionally he’ll make short downhill runs through the trees, and I am momentarily alone with only the sun, the sky, and the hard-packed snow. Each time he disappears I am gripped with the fear that something will happen to him and he won’t come back, and then how will I get down the mountain? There are no marked trails here, and I’d probably get lost. At least I have my shirt and jacket in my backpack.

Finally we are above the tree line. The view is stupendous, but the light is fading. It’s time to head back down. It will be a fast ride: a thin crust of ice is forming on the snow as the temperature drops. We take off through a glistening forest of spruce and pine. I do my best to stay fluid and relaxed but am just barely keeping up with my partner when I see a group of skiers watching us sail by. They’ll have a good story to tell.

That man and I have been married for more than twenty years. We don’t ski anymore — he’s had back problems, and we’re both in our sixties — but he still likes to run around naked on our rural homestead, and I still like to catch glimpses of his bare body through the trees.

Maria Savage
Island Mountain, California

When my siblings and I were kids, our mother would play the same trick on us every year: On the first of April she would wake us early in the morning, shouting, “Quick, get up! It snowed a foot last night! Go see!”

Every year we would kick off the covers, run to the window, and find only the green spring grass. Our mother would laugh and shout, “April Fool!” and we would feel stupid for falling for it yet again. But it was hard to stay angry, seeing her so delighted at having tricked us.

Even after I grew up and had kids of my own, my mother would call me early in the morning every April 1 and ask, “Did you see the snow?” and I would laugh.

Months after my mother died, we really did get a foot of snow on the first of April. I smiled like a fool the whole day.

Risa Scranton
Albany, New York

I grew up in Los Angeles in the fifties, and every winter my family would drive to Big Bear Lake in the mountains so my brother and I could play in the snow. We’d careen down the hills on sleds or toboggans, trying to hit all the bumps. When we were wet, tired, and hungry, we’d eat the hot chili and cookies our mother had brought.

In 1968, when I was twenty-three, I married Jack, and we moved to his home state of Michigan to go to college. We arrived in August and found a place to rent about three miles from campus.

On Thanksgiving morning we were sitting in our tiny living room with the gas heater blowing when I looked out the window and saw that it was snowing — in my front yard! I didn’t have to get in a car and drive to it; it was right there, falling and sticking. I ran outdoors to play while my husband stayed inside and continued reading, making no comment.

Two days later there was five feet of snow. The plows had pushed it into ten-foot-high mounds along the road. Icicles hung from our eaves, pointy enough to pierce our skulls. It was ten degrees below zero, for God’s sake. There were no snowmen, no sledding, no hot chili. Miserable, I combated the gloom by getting stoned every night and listening to the Beatles’ Abbey Road.

My husband and I were arguing, and he met my complaints with a smug look. The conservatism of the Midwest was getting me down, but most of all I hated that fucking snow. It stayed on the ground all winter, turning brown and crusty. Our car was corroded from the salt on the roads. Everything was gray and cold and wet. Then, in April, the thaw finally came. Hallelujah! No more slippery, dirty, depressing snow.

Two weeks later it snowed another four feet.

Kit S.
Portland, Oregon

Arguments were rare in our house, so I remember well the one that started when I was eight and my father wanted us to make our obligatory monthly trip to visit his parents in Greenwald, Minnesota, a hundred miles north. I heard him and my mother “discussing” it after I was tucked into bed. She did not want to venture out because a major snowstorm had been predicted. She also suspected that one of the children — me — was coming down with something.

My father won, however, and we left early the next morning, hoping to arrive before the storm hit. An hour after we got on the road, the snow started blowing in gusts across the windshield of our 1938 Chevy coupe. The first flakes were heavy and wet. Then the precipitation turned drier — sparkling crystals like powdered sugar that glistened in the winter sun.

I sat on my mother’s lap, my hot forehead resting on her shoulder, and listened to the slap-slap of the wipers. My older brother was wedged on the seat between us and our father. No one spoke other than my mother, who recited Hail Marys and Our Fathers.

I dozed for most of the ride and woke when we bumped over the railroad tracks near my grandparents’ house. By then my condition had deteriorated. I was coughing and wheezing as they brought me inside.

My grandpa was a section boss for the Soo Line Railroad, and he and my grandma lived rent-free in a house with a wood-burning stove but no indoor plumbing and no heat upstairs. I recall my mother telling Grandma Mae that I would spend the night downstairs on the living-room sofa near the stove. Mom slept in an overstuffed chair pulled close to my head, waking periodically to lay a cool palm against my burning cheeks or a wet towel on my forehead.

The snow fell and the wind howled all night. By morning my wheezing and fever had worsened, and my mother bluntly told my father that I needed to be hospitalized. My frugal grandparents were horrified: How could my parents waste money like that on a mere child — even worse, a girl? Their two sons had never needed a doctor. Venturing out in the middle of a blizzard was sheer folly, they said, something only their foolish daughter-in-law would suggest.

But my mother prevailed, and my dad finally agreed I should be taken to Saint Michael’s Hospital in Sauk Centre. Mom cranked the phone in the kitchen and called the neighbors, a large family whose fearless sons were eager to test their shiny new Ford pickup against the Minnesota snow.

At the hospital I was diagnosed with pneumonia and put in a private room with my very own button to call the nurse. I knew when a penicillin shot was coming, because I could hear the wails of the other pediatric patients getting theirs. I would grit my teeth each time the nurse rolled me on my side for my injection, but I always felt better soon afterward.

I stayed a full week at Saint Michael’s. On the day I was discharged, Mom told me we needed to return to my grandparents’ house to retrieve my brother. My reception there was as icy as the winter weather. Grandma remarked on her “expensive” granddaughter. And my poor brother had been so lonely, she said, that she and Grandpa had walked uptown that morning and purchased him a new Radio Flyer sled to cheer him up. My mother seethed as my brother’s gift was lashed to the roof of the car.

That winter was when I realized that my brave, stubborn mother would defend me against all foes, even inside our own family.

J.G.
Glendale, Arizona

In my thirties I was an instructor at a state university in Pennsylvania. One winter holiday I went home alone to my parents’ house for Christmas. Still single and childless, without even any romantic prospects, I was feeling sorry for myself. My mother and I had long talks over strong drinks about the importance of waiting to meet the right person and how lucky I was to have a career in higher education.

On Christmas Eve, as I read a book by the roaring fire, I noticed the wood was dwindling and asked where I might find some more. My stepfather, Bill, told my mother and me to meet him at the chopping block. In a few minutes we were all standing near the rear of their acreage, bundled in our winter coats. Bill set a log on the block and handed me the ax. “Don’t think about it too much,” he said. “Just eyeball the middle of the log and come down swiftly.”

I missed on my first couple of tries but then found my rhythm. I loved the feel of the blade striking wood. After a while I discarded my coat and scarf, and we took turns with the ax, singing Christmas songs and laughing at the occasional off-center blows. Then it began to snow.

We all looked at each other and smiled. A deer appeared by the pond, flicking his ears. I wanted to make a comment about the picture-perfect moment, but my voice would have broken the cathedral silence. Suddenly I no longer felt so sorry for myself.

Mary Beth Simmons
West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania

The February blizzard dumped a foot and a half of snow on Long Island. I was a facilities manager for a nonprofit organization, and it was my duty to remove the snow from in front of the soup kitchen, the main office, and five homeless shelters. My crew of four and I each chose a location and proceeded to go about the imposing task. At fifty-six I was the oldest in the group, and my guys gave me the easiest location — because, they said, they didn’t want to see the headlines the following morning: “Man Dies of Heart Attack While Helping the Homeless.” I was aware of my limits, and by the time I’d finished shoveling, I was approaching them.

As I drove to check on the others, I passed the veterans’ shelter and saw a young man shoveling the sixty-foot driveway. Thinking he was one of my guys, I stopped to help. I discovered that the man shoveling was staying at the shelter, and his name was Tim. He told me he had been at it for more than two hours. I commended him on a great job and grabbed a shovel.

As we worked together to clear the drive, Tim told me he had a history of drug abuse and had recently started using again after being clean for nearly five years. He was scheduled to go back into rehab the next day. A friend of his was supposed to stop by and give him some money for the bus to rehab, and for some much-needed cigarettes, but the blizzard had put a stop to that plan.

After we finished, I gave Tim twenty dollars: enough for the bus and a pack of cigarettes. An ex-smoker, I knew what it meant to be in the throes of a nicotine fit. Tim was grateful. “You saved my life,” he told me.

I looked at the long driveway he’d just shoveled most of and told him, “I believe you might have just done the same for me.”

Tom Daniels
Lindenhurst, New York

My mother was a paranoid schizophrenic. My father divorced her after she tried to kill him with a pair of scissors while he slept. That was in 1960, when I was eleven. Shortly thereafter Virginia (I call my mother by her first name now because she never felt like a mother to me) took me with her to Iowa, to live with her mother.

My grandmother kicked us out after just three months. She said it was because “three generations in one house is too much for me.” But I found out later that Virginia had cornered one of my grandmother’s boarders, a student from the local medical school, and accused him of wanting to look up her dress. He moved out the next day, and we were told to leave the day after that. We found an apartment that was all Virginia could afford on her income of child support, and we lived there for the next three years.

Virginia disliked certain colors. She detested red, for example, because it represented sex. If a woman was wearing a red dress on TV, Virginia would curse at her. And brown symbolized dirt and impurity. The only colors she was comfortable with were green, blue, and her favorite, white. She sewed three pleated skirts for me to wear to junior high school: one solid navy, another solid green, and the third a green-and-blue plaid. They looked as homemade as they were. She bought ugly, uncomfortable white iron furniture for our apartment, along with white towels, sheets, rugs, dishes, and place mats. The decor was as icy as her mental state, but she was soothed by it.

Her best days were when there was snow on the ground — which, thankfully, there often was during Iowa winters. All that white put her in a better mood. I could breathe a little easier on days when it snowed.

M.B.
Decatur, Georgia