Snow Day
Dining table forts, sumo oranges, babies in snowsuits
Last Thursday, my husband sent me a text thirty minutes before his lunchbreak, with the happiest news of the year thus far: “Long weekend!” With snow and ice in the forecast, a (for the most part) once a year occurrence in south Arkansas, he was home for good, and life quickly felt like childhood again, waiting for the phone call that school was cancelled. I ran to our linen closet and dug out our fleece sheets, a soft blanket, and the mattress to Kit’s pack-n-play, and the girls and I built a fort under the dining table as fast as we could. I pushed all the chairs out of the way and padded the corners with big striped and gingham ruffled pillows, gathered a basket of Kit’s toys and a row of stuffed bunnies, Annie’s bed nestled in the corner, a battery powered, very realistic candle the size of a planter cozied up in the middle. When I closed the sheet down, enclosing the three of us in a room that smelled of clean sheets and baby, Kit started bouncing and smiling, just immeasurably overjoyed at this new discovery of a fort. Through the crack of the window and the leafy middle of the camellia tree, we watched for Price to come home, waiting to surprise him with our snow fort.
The snow came overnight, waking us up through the slivers of curtain cracks with white sky, white streets, white pots of frozen flowers. And the cold…the inescapable cold that seems to seep into every crevice of our old house I fear is barely insulated. We nestled into the library to watch Hoda’s last broadcast of the Today show, all of us in fleece and thick socks. During the third hour, we bundled the girls up into their snowsuits and moseyed out into our backyard, letting Annie run free. The ground was hard with ice, but the top was soft with snow, and as Kit crawled, you could barely see remnants of her tracks. And Annie…she loved it most of all. When our cheeks were too cold, we found ourselves closed into the kitchen, cutting up sumo oranges for yogurt and pouring bowls of cereal, cups of hot coffee as quickly as we could, as Hoda & Jenna was mere minutes from starting. We ate our breakfast and smiled through the whole show, Price watching me out of the corner of his eye… “Don’t you be crying over there.”
Each day of the weekend felt almost exactly the same…soft, slow, cold, yet warm. As the morning melted into afternoon, we’d open the French doors of the library and expand our day into the living room, where the fort lives and the front window Annie loves so much, where our first couch is settled and the fireplace Kit is so very interested in resides. We went back and forth between the fort and the couch, watching basketball or golf or Price’s current fixation, American Pickers. I started season three of the Traitors last week, and Price started watching with me during one of Kit’s naps in the front room, watching the third episode in bed Sunday night and groaning when we saw the next episode wasn’t until Thursday.
At night, we played the dance of what in the world are we supposed to have for dinner. Given I had gone to the grocery store on Wednesday afternoon, saw and rolled my eyes at the obnoxious shoppers buying enough bread and milk to feed a junior high football team (despite the roads being cleared by Saturday afternoon), and somehow, I still managed to barely scrape together any meals over the weekend. One night, we enjoyed cereal, crescent rolls, and bacon…and it was divine. And every night for dessert, I spent twenty minutes after Kit went to sleep peeling every tiny little vein of white off of a sumo orange, laying them flat on parchment paper and drizzling with melted Ghirardelli semi-sweet chocolate chips, leaving them in the freezer while I showered, and enjoying them in bed, cocooned in my comforter and Annie curled up beside me.
It felt like the four of us existed in a tiny snow globe, the size of our house. Candlelight and pajamas all day, rationing the last three cups of coffee, following Kit around on our hands and knees, turning the heat up, and up, and up, higher than I’ve ever purposefully set my thermostat at. Price and I wore these matching L.L. Bean flannel fleeces he’s had since before he knew me, but brought out of storage the week after we got engaged, when we both fell ill with the dreadful Coronavirus and spent our days together on my apartment couch, the one we spent our days on this weekend. The next time we lived in them for days on end was that winter, when the most snow I’ve ever seen in my life fell and work was cancelled for a week, so we worked out of my kitchen and ate leftover Valentine’s Day cake for breakfast, our flannels and a space heater to warm us after venturing out into the parking lot with grocery sacks on our feet, as neither of us had any sort of shoe appropriate for snow.
Some of our most precious times together have been curled up together, safe from the cold of a snowstorm.
There was something so childlike, so relieving to being “snowed in,” especially after the risk of losing power had passed. This comfort in knowing nobody was going anywhere, that our world was paused, everyone sent home, life covered in a blanket of snow.
