Snow Day Memories

This morning we woke up to the first snow of the season. It's an omen of a long hard winter when it snows this early, but I decided to make the most of it and dash out for a few quick photos in the skirt I won in theSoubretteBrunette's Birthday Giveaway. More on that later, but for now, this winter dusting has me in mind of another snow day when I was very young.

Head folded under an embarrassing red fuzzy hat with an oversized pom pom on top, I stared down and kicked up the pebbles that were frozen to the ground. I heard the grumble rolling toward me; I didn't have to look up. It was just perfect really because I didn't want to look up. I knew without looking that it was the great yellow beast that slithered through the city streets and country roads like mine gobbling up children every morning and spitting them out again every afternoon. I didn't want to see it because just the sound of that low groan was enough to curdle the few swigs of chocolate Instant Breakfast I'd managed to choke down minutes before I was hurriedly kissed and deposited here. I looked across the road, and there on the top of the hill was our milk barn where my little mother was busily draining Holsteins before the milk truck arrived. I wished I could be there with her, doing something more useful than math and recess.

Then I lost myself in arguments against the education system...Why recess? I'm here to "learn." If they would skip all these playtime breaks, I could leave earlier and play at home. My eyes drifted from the hill top, just to my right where my brother stood, He-Man lunch box in one hand, one strap of his backpack gripped by the other, same dumb red hat atop his mop of hair, stoically staring across the hill at home too. Behind me, the smoke rolled out of my grandparent's chimney. We caught the bus at their house every morning and I knew if I turned and fled the beastly bus to beg for refuge in their house, the answer would come in the form of a swift swat on the bottom and forceful shove back out the door. There was nothing for it. The beast approached and, like Sisyphus, I was bound to the hell of this daily repetition. I lifted my head as the last loud rumble signaled it was time to face my fate. I must enter the mouth of the monster and go to school.

My stomach twisted knots on the ride. A schoolmate saw me board and bounced onto the green pleather seat next to me. She babbled about her evening and her new dolls and I smiled and tried to listen but all I could do was wonder how anyone could be so foolish as to be happy about going to school. Hurled from the bus by the throng of eager dolts rushing to the playground, Jamie and I held hands as we walked to class and she promised to share a lunch treasure with me--it was an unnaturally square piece of ham with tiny perfect squares of cheese mysteriously imbedded in it. She assured me it was a covetable treat and I was intrigued. The day began with all the usual fare: pledges, roll call and paying for lunches. Feet shuffled under desks and the line at the pencil sharpener waned. Then the grind began.

Numbers, letters, lessons, drudgery, despair. At 9:30 a concerned look clouded the face of my roly-poly blue-haired teacher. She crossed the room and looked out the window. Rolling dark clouds covered the sky and the sleet and snow started to fall. She left a moment and then returned looking no less worried. At bathroom break several teachers huddled and whispered. I caught snippets like "freezing roads," "dangerous," and "safety." They all now carried that same furrowed brow as my dear old teacher as they shuffled back to their classrooms. My teacher's normally laser-precise focus was absent today. She trailed off during several lessons to look out the window and grimace. At 11:30 the announcement came. We wouldn't have lunch that day at our usual noon. We would continue working and dismiss early at 1:15. Others squealed their delight or high-fived across aisles. I felt my stomach knots clench tighter and not just from the thought of delayed lunch. The sleet was already falling and between me and my house were at least half a dozen hills of varying steepness. I was the first one off the bus each day, so how many more steep hills and icy dirt roads did the others have to take before they got home? The teacher-whispered words were starting to make sense and I was never more grateful for my short bus ride than in that moment. And the sleet kept falling while we waited.

Backpack in hand, work put away, and desk spotless I watched the clock for the last ten minutes of the day. The classroom was restless to the point of pandemonium by the time the bell finally sounded at 1:15. When it did ring, it was every kid for himself as we ran through the sleet and snow to reach our buses. I toppled into a seat near the front and stomped the sleet off my shoes. Too late, my feet were two frozen blue chunks of tundra. Jamie, not having the urgency about the situation that I did, arrived moments before the bus slammed its doors and roared out of the school yard. True to her word, she began unpacking her lunch box and produced the promised ham and cheese combo square. It was a welcome distraction. First she held it out for me to inspect. Then she demonstrated how the cheeses could be plucked from the ham leaving square holes behind. It. Was. Magic! We extracted tiny cheese squares and nibbled them first before turning to the ham.

Once the ham was gone, my friend pulled out a packet of Sunkist Fruit Wrinkles, which contained almost no fruit, tasted amazing, and looked like what you would find in the tissue after a congested strawberry blew its nose. Just as she tore the paper open the bus lurched. We were going down a steep ice crusted hill slightly sideways. The silver haired driver tried to brake, but momentum had "taken the wheel" as the saying goes. He wrestled the wheel, flung a few salty words at the weather, and righted the bus back to its proper lane on the road. Seeing we were in danger I did what any reasonable child would do, I panicked and said every prayer I knew, quoted every verse I'd memorized.

Jamie, hearing my prayers and sensing the end may be near, ripped through the paper packet, pulled one of my hands from the clasped prayer position, dumped half the fruit wrinkles into it, and began inhaling her share. That's right, if this was the end, she wasn't going down without dessert. I stared at the red fruity lumps in my hand for a long slow minute, suddenly ungrateful. If I had to have a last meal, I would have chosen chocolate pudding, which was unarguably the pinnacle of the bag lunch dessert hierarchy. Glassy-eyed, I numbly shoved them in my mouth and thought, "So, this is how it ends, not with a bang but with a Wrinkle." Or something equivalent in 6 year old language. The bus slid again, this time leaving the road and careening toward a sheer drop. I heard the driver use language I had only heard once before when my dad was trying to fix our busted T.V. Although I wasn't exactly sure what the some of the words meant, or why the bus would be insulted if the driver pointed out that that particular bus didn't have a dad, if the previous usage was any indication, the bus like our old tube set was doomed and all of us along with it. My friend and I clutched hands and I shut my eyes tight while the sliding continued and the screams of the other children began.

A small eternity later, the bus skidded to a stop, not at our usual spot in front of my grandparents' house, but a quarter mile earlier, directly at the bottom of the hill where my mom was waiting at the end of our dirt road in our rusty orange Chevy flatbed, the same old farm truck that had run me over the year before and left me dazed in a ditch with a jagged bone protruding from my leg. But, I suppose that is really a story for another time. Fearing the worsening storm, and thinking we'd be better off sliding down the hill together in The Bone Crusher than in a fatherless bus, Mom was on her way to pick us up in case the bus couldn't make it. She met us instead just as our near death adventure ended. The beast spat us out and we climbed inside the warm truck. Mom, ashen-faced and muttering something about the brainless superintendent, who did have a dad but whose mother was apparently of canine descent, risking lives to save a snow day, turned around and headed home as the bus groaned on down the road.

Back on the farm we piled out of the truck and hurried into the warm house where the fire was roaring and there were mugs of hot cocoa waiting. That evening, as my heavily layered-up mother slipped into the tenth and final layer, her blue snowsuit, to waddle out to the milk barn and begin the task of wringing out the cows once more, I remarked over my shoulder that, "on our next shopping trip I'd like to pick up some ham with cheese mashed in it and some of those Fruit Wrinkles too." Zzzzzzzzrrrrip! Her suit now fully zipped, mom grabbed one of our endless supply of red pom-pom hats and called over her shoulder that we had both ham and cheese in the fridge, and God gave me two hands to use mashing them together myself. Also there was real fruit on the counter. I thought to myself that a simple No would have sufficed.

Not one word was said of our perilous drive. The rest of the day, I watched the snow from the safety of my living room window, glancing back now and then to ponder the appeal of soap operas, "eww, so much kissing!" and later to see what hijinks Burt and Ernie were up to. Staring at the growing layers of ice and snow, I felt thankful for the next few days ahead when the snow would keep me home and keep the bus beast sleeping in its cave.