First Snow

“This ain’t much,” I scoffed. A patch of slush lay puddling at my booted feet; a fine dusting of what would’ve been my first snow ever had there been enough of it for me to get a good gander at what was already melting atop the hedge. “Gran’ma, now I’ve seen snow, I can’t say as I’m altogether impressed.”

“You just wait, child,” she said, eyes narrowing as she gazed over my head into the whitening sky. “You just wait.”

“I’m twenty-six, Gran’ma, and an old married man. You can stop calling me ‘child’ any old time now.

“Never,” she declared, planting a wet one on my cheek. “Well, are you comin’ in or goin’ out, then?” I decided to go in. Snow or no snow, Gran’ma had a pretty good fire going in the living room, and that was special. We don’t see much of that in Alabama.

The next day it rained. The day after that, the rain froze and my wife and I went boot-skating in the driveway. She’s only 19. Yeah, I know, I robbed the cradle and all that. (Looks worse than it is -- Linda’s flat as a Georgia accent and short, so she looks about 12; folks are always asking how old my “daughter” is!) We’d been married almost a month, too. Coming north was her idea; she had relatives she couldn’t abide, up in Maine, but she wanted to see snow, and I’d never seen it myself, so I promised her we’d honeymoon with Gran’ma in Maryland. It wouldn’t be the North Pole, but it was north of where we’d grown up.

Then Gran’ma’s prediction was fulfilled: big, white fluffy globs of nothingness drifted down to us, then fell peltingly, all force but still with no substance, and then it came down so fast and thick we couldn’t even see. We slogged through whiteness in slow motion; we felt like FDR outside Campobello. We stood on the porch and couldn’t find the house.

“I think it’s snowing,” said Linda, perceptively.

“I think it’s blizzing,” I corrected her.

“How lost can we get?”

“I dunno,” I admitted. “You still up for this?”

“Sure am.”

“All right, then. Don’t let go.”

I wrapped an arm around her and she clung to that arm, and off we went... smack into the front door (we knew by the wreathe).

“Oops!”

We turned around and kind of slid forward until we felt a little give; that would be the porch steps. We got down those okay, and onto the flagstone path, which we knew curved. Not having measured that curb, we knew we could be walking on the lawn at any moment, but we weren’t worried: it was all the same. We just hoped we’d know if and when we got to the street, without falling off the curb.

Well, we did fall off the curb, but it wasn’t tragic. We just got a little jolted, and there was already a smidge of ice under there, so we had to right ourselves in ways our spines didn’t much like, but all in all we made it into the street without injury. There was no way traffic could get through any of this, so we were not afraid to stand there in the street, unable to see even each other, which made us cling closer than ever. When we opened our mouths, snow fell in. When we opened our eyes, snow fell in. We opened our mittened hands: snow fell in.

“Okay, that’s enough, now,” said Linda, in a quivering voice, like the little girl she often seemed to be. She turned and snuggled into my chest, and I hugged her close. “Let’s go back.”

I stuck out my hand level with where I knew her head was, then lowered it carefully. I was still mostly above the line but Linda was pushing through the snow shoulder-high.

We turned very carefully, felt the curb and got our feet back up over it, and got all the way up to the porch without breaking our necks. We did the same thing with the porch steps, soaking our mittens in the snow that had built up on the wooden railings. When we walked into the wreathe again, we felt around for the doorknob and clinched our safety.

“Y’all have fun?” inquired Gran’ma. “How was it? How far’d you get?”

“Oh, miles,” declared Linda. “We were out for hours! Didn’tcha miss us?”

“Horribly,” said Gran’ma. “You must be in dire need of a cup of cocoa.”

“Absolutely,” said I, and we all repaired to the kitchen.

A quarter of an hour later we were all sitting in the kitchen, mittens off, clutching steaming cocoa, Linda and I still snuggling close to one another, with Gran’ma trying not to giggle at us and our honeymooning ways. “I’m surprised you didn’t melt all that snow,” she couldn’t help remarking.

Linda blushed. I love how she does that.

“Gran’ma,” I said, “we’re too tired for any of that. We have to conserve our energy for our second snow.”

THE END