Wet Wool on the Radiator and Cocoa on the Stove

Bread bags inside your boots, a park hill nobody supervised, and the particular ache of fingers coming back to life over a kitchen register.

News for the America we remember

Getting dressed took twenty minutes and half of it was pointless.

Long johns first. Then two pairs of socks, then the pants, then a sweater over the shirt, and then the snowsuit, which in my house was a hand-me-down and stiff as cardboard until it warmed up. Then the boots, and before the boots, the bread bags. My mother slid a bread bag over each sock, because the boots leaked and the bread bag was free, and every kid on that hill had a Wonder Bread wrapper crumpled inside his galoshes.

Then the scarf, wrapped twice and crossed over the chest, and the hat pulled down, and the mittens on strings that ran up one sleeve and down the other. And then you were sealed in and could barely bend at the waist, and inevitably you had to use the bathroom, and it all came off.

The storm itself was the best part before any of it happened. The radio going in the kitchen in the dark, my father listening for the school closings, the announcer reading them alphabetically so you had to sit through forty other districts. And then your district, and the sound my sister made, and my father putting his coffee down and saying, well, and going to find the shovel. The city was quiet on those mornings in a way it never was otherwise. Sound goes flat under a foot of snow. No traffic, no buses. You went out the door into a street that belonged to nobody, and the first thing you did was walk in the middle of the road just because you

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