When I got home, I discovered that our farmer neighbor Red Wester ("biggest man west of Albany") had come through with his plow and cleared our driveway. This was the best news I had heard all day. That afternoon my sister Jean and I dug a tunnel in the drift that was left by Red's plow. It was at least 50 feet long, and you could stand up inside it.
When we came in for supper, our wrists were rubbed raw by the little bangles of ice that collected on our cuffs.
I left my leather mittens on top of the hall radiator, where they gradually curled up into gnarled fists. The hall was full of wet socks and galoshes.
Out back, the closed-in kitchen porch where we kept the cream separator had its own little two-foot drifts where snow had whistled the temporary wooden walls. Floyd the hired man had left his boots there when he went to milk the cow the night before, and by morning they were heaped over with snow like big ice cream cones . . .
Anyway, here I was in Baltimore, and the radio was listing all the school closings. Even the colleges were closed. I could hear no traffic going by outside, just the rumble of the plows.
This is going to be great, I thought. A real old-fashioned winter.
I pulled open the shades.
What a shock! I tell you.
There was an inch and a half of snow.
5) Michael Kernan writes from Baltimore.
Michael Kernan
