Original post date: March 29, 2020
I have a little update for you about our great adventure in the snow. There are details that stick with you, but sometimes one morphs into another and I thought I'd just called Mom, to read her my post. She couldn't believe I remembered as much as I did, but in much the way snow drifts and distorts the landscape, so can time. So, we grabbed a cup of tea, settled into our chairs at our respective houses and Mom filled in the rest of the story for me. When I was very young, our house sat on a circle at the top of a hill, and the street our house was on wound down the hill in a sort of corkscrew path to the bottom where the sidewalked road started and led all the way to Bluevale Rd. This is where my classmate Daniel lived. I might also point out that this is where the snow would have been the deepest because that was the corner we had just walked down to from the school. It really was, "uphill, both ways' for us to walk to and from school! We had often taken the shortcut straight up the hill from his house to ours when walking home, and it was this route that my sister intended to take that day, once she realized we had missed Harvard street. It seems there was another child walking with us, named Daniel, who was in my class, and my sister wasn't just leading me home. I find it funny that I can remember certain moments so clearly, but not this. Apparently, when we reached the bottom of the hill (that I couldn't see), she did stop, and we started to climb the snowbank together (this is the great hill I remember?). It was then that Daniel's father called to us. He was standing in the snow with their door open, keeping watch. Theirs was indeed, the last house before that field, and he was worried his son might go too far and be lost. He was waiting for his son and he saved all of us. He brought us into his house and called our mother. She had tried to walk out during that lull in the storm, to meet us, coming down the street side of our houses. She had been forced to turn back because the snow there was up to her thighs and when the wind struck up again, visibility was too poor to continue. She thought it impossible that our principal would have sent us out alone in that storm. So, she called my father at work to go and get us from school. When he found the school almost deserted, and that we had been sent out in the storm, I can only imagine what he must have said to our principal (Dad wouldn't tell me, exactly - but I'm sure it was good!) Somehow, Dad learned that we were at Daniel's house and he came to get us. That was where he hugged us. He left his car at the low street and climbed up the hill with us. And that's how we made it home.
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