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71 T he day I was married, it snowed. When I woke, I could see only blurred sky. But I knew. When it snows or is about to snow, the air has a quality to it like the inside of a steel canister. The world closes in and the atmosphere becomes metallic. Snow in November was not, in and of itself, unusual—especially in Vermont, where the wedding took place. I wore Maine hunting boots under my wedding dress to the old meetinghouse where we said our vows, the snow adding to the general excitement . An event, the way snow brightens the dark ground—the ordinary become the unexpected. My graduate school roommate told me that, in some Asian cultures, snow is considered a sign of luck. And luck is out of our control. A friend once mentioned that skiers often say, “Turn in the white, miss the black.” He’d heard it while skiing the backcountry out West, an old burn area, charred trunks rising up against a slope of clean snow. As he sped downhill, the black and white flicker became disorienting, and he said he had to look for the white—focus on the spaces, not the obstacles—to maintain control. For a while, this became my mantra—turn in the white, miss the black—looking for the white spaces, ignoring the obstacles. The interstitial flicker of escape in rapid intersection with dark reality. When I first learned I was pregnant, I was alone. Staring at the lines on the white test strip, a sense of awe settled over me—an awe like the flash before fear rushes dark into that bright opening . I sat down at our dining table pondering the weight of this responsibility. I kept my misgivings to myself. JENEVA STONE WINTER KEPT US WARM Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. —T. S. Eliot colorado review 72 I gave birth to a child who seemed typical at first, but who, thirteen months into his life, crashed through a weakened floor in the house of his well-being in a catastrophic medical event. He was left profoundly disabled. We still don’t know what triggered his collapse, and he remained undiagnosed for nearly thirteen years. I can remember, as a child in Vermont, snowbanks higher than I was lining the walkway that led from our front porch to the sidewalk, and the snow on my grandparents’ farm obliterating every mark of normalcy, changing our landmarks. All this disorientation a form of play, the known world inverted, the ordinary become the unexpected. Winter in the dc area, where I now live, isn’t much most of the time: the occasional huge snowfall, smatterings of ice and slush, and so on. An inconvenience, really. My daughter (my second child) loves these brief glimpses of winter. A look through a glass darkly into another world, I suppose. But my son, Robert, now wheelchair-bound, can’t navigate the outdoors in a foot or two of snow. So when the big storms come, we’re confined to the house. Trapped might be another word for it. I have come to prefer spring. An old memory, a non sequitur, declares itself repeatedly: I’m driving my cousin Amelia into Burlington in my parents’ car, and we’re headed around a moderate curve. Amelia is very young, perhaps six or seven, a serious child with close-cropped dark hair. She is strapped into the passenger seat. I may be in high school or even college; I’ve had a driver’s license from the time I was fourteen years old. It is snowing, or it has been snowing, and there is a light accumulation on the road and the shoulders. Maybe I hit the brake lightly, or maybe it’s a consequence of the dynamics of steering, but the car goes into a gentle skid. Amelia has been quiet, as she usually is, but her voice pitches high and startled, “We’re slidin’!” And we are sliding, several feet to the side of the road. I learned to drive before anti-lock brakes were standard, so I have undoubtedly released my...

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