Magical Night

 We, as parents, want to give our children a better life than we had. So we purchase expensive gifts, computers and tablets and ipads and cars before they’re mature enough to have one and the list goes on and on and on. Sometimes I wonder why we do such things. When I think back, and when I talk with my children about growing up it isn’t the purchased things they remember. When my youngest son was just six months old, I took my two boys and  ran away from home to never go back again. That's another story too long to tell here. Josh, Kevin and I grew up together at a place we call “the End of the Road”. Many special memories were created in this house and yard and the farm that surrounds it.

Now, in the middle of a cold January my thoughts go back to a snowy night when Kev was about three years old and Josh was nine.

Late in the evening a few huge snowflakes started falling. We sat in the window and counted them, one, two three….

A bit later they were falling faster but still huge we had to count them by twos, two, four, six, eight….

But then those giant flakes really started coming down we counted them by tens…. ten, twenty, thirty, forty….then there was so many we couldn’t count them.

When dark came the driveway to our neighbor’s house was covered with about four inches of snow.

“Wanna go out and play in the snow”, I asked with excitement

“Mom, it’s dark”, Josh was a bit apprehensive.

“Oh but we can see by the night lights”. The light at the corner of our yard and the one in our closest neighbor’s yard met making the snow glisten like sun dancing on a frosty field.

I put Kev’s snow suit on him. He looked like the Michelin man with his arms stuck out and his legs almost stiff from all the padding. By the time I got dressed, Josh was ready to go.

Josh helped me dig through the bathroom closet to find a rope.

When we got outside, we wrapped the center of the rope around my tummy and tied the ends to the handles on the sled. I placed Kevin on the sled so I could pull him down the road. Josh ran from Kevin to me and then behind the sled to help push. Yonna, our dog, bounced and barked alongside Kevin and the sled.

The snow was still falling fast. Large flakes looked the size of quarters or larger. The light glistened on the white crystals that had piled up on the ground. They clung to the needles on the pine trees bowing their limbs toward the ground. Big eyes full of excitement were all I could see when I looked at Josh and Kev. Hoods and masks to keep them warm hid everything else.

We parked the sled under Verdie’s night light. Josh Helped Kev off the sled and the tree of us played in the snow. 

“Open your mouth and stick out your tongue. See if you can catch some flakes. We must have looked silly running around in circles catching snowflakes and laughing out loud. 

Josh thought his mom was crazy for sure when I stepped out of the rope and lay down in the snow. I started waving my arms and feet back and forth through the snow.

“This is how you make snow angels. Wanna make one”.

The three of us lay side by side in that field of snow and made a family of angels while Yonna pranced all around us.

After walking, running and throwing some snow we started the trek back to the house. It was a much quieter walk. I looked back at Kev in the sled, he had laid down with his hands under his head trying hard to keep his eyes open. Josh yawned and Yonna was walking instead of bouncing.

Carrying Kev into the house was a chore. He must have weighed twenty pounds more than when we left the house.

There’s nothing warmer than hickory burning in a cast iron stove when your toes and fingers are frozen. After we thawed and had our jammies on, I tucked Kevin in bed and kissed him goodnight. He was fast asleep before I could turn out the light. I sat in the floor looking out the window. Josh came sneaking down the hall.

“Mom”, he said as he put both arms around my neck then with a big kiss to the cheek he said “Thank you for this magical night”. Before I could say anything, he was off to his bedroom.

As I lay there in the floor watching the snow pile even deeper I thought about his words. I would never have imagined a walk in the snow would be seen through the eyes of a child as a “magical night” but indeed, it was. Now, more than twenty years later that night seems like yesterday, but, too, it seems like another lifetime. Sometimes I steal a few moments to lie in the floor in front of the stove with hickory wood crackling and the ceiling fan humming. I close my eyes and think about the kisses on the cheek, the hot chocolate after sledding and playing in Laurel Creek or riding the merry go round at Grayson Lake. It makes me happy to think about those simple things we did as a family, just the three of us. This little bit of time lying in the floor, it's my magical moments.