Snow Day #2

I was at a girl’s birthday celebration, back around the age of thirteen. This was I believe in February, and the snow was still thick on the land.

I like that phrase, “the snow was still thick on the land”. It sounds sort of old-timey. It sounds like the way a grandfather figure would start a story while he sits in front of a fire, focusing on a long winter past and completely ignorant of how to entertain a group of people listening to his long and hackneyed fables; said people’s minds start drifting and concocting plans on how to do away with gramps in his sleep and make it look like an accident.

Sorry, I digress. Anyway, there was a barn on the property, complete with a hay loft door upstairs. We went out to the barn, all of us, tramping through the snow. I can’t remember why we went out there exactly, there wasn’t really anything to look at.

During the whole party, I was trying to grab the attention of a girl, and I was failing miserably. We were all walking back to the house and it fell on me all at once that this girl wanted nothing to do with me – and I felt like a bigger loser than normal (and at thirteen that was a depression bomb that would lay major waste).

I fell behind the rest of the group and stopped, standing there in the snow and watching them get smaller and smaller as they got further from the barn. I let loose a miserable groan and let myself fall with force to the snow.

I lay there for a moment, watching the snow come down through the light streaming out from the barn. I didn’t realize that Danny had stayed behind and was now calling me from the upstairs hayloft door. I raised my head and looked at him. He was waving in silhouette, his shadow stretching out long between me and the barn. Chris was also up there, in a dress that went down to her calves, and I remember thinking that she must be cold in that dress. Just then she started doing a spastic Charleston dance routine that made me laugh so hard… I laid my head back down and laughed up into the falling snow.

To this day, when I think of that tiny silhouette and long shadow doing that shaky-kneed dance, I still smile like a goon.