Snow Storm
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Annamaria’s 17th birthday – Collette couldn’t quite believe it. Little Annamaria English, who only a short time ago had played with Rose every Friday morning, sniffing her parts (bits of torn blanket or ribbons), which most of the English children seemed to have done at the time. And here she was, a junior in high school, turning 17.
It seemed like practically yesterday, and yet at the same time so long ago, that Collette had celebrated her own 17th. It had been only five months since she had been back from Hungary, and she had been given a tin box of Hungarian paprika as a gift from the family and a Hungarian cookbook, another tin of chocolate wafer sticks, and a squishy dark turquoise sweater from Carrie-Bri, a little wooden whistle from the kids, a paper umbrella from Rose… they had all made a trip over to World Market for her gifts that year. There were others, but those stuck out in her memory.
In other news, Lucia had also been offered the job at NAWS and would begin shortly. It was Carrie’s day to start her position there as customer service representative, hopefully moving to “saves” within weeks, as her new boss told her.
“You rock,” he had said, and told her that she would have no trouble advancing to commission in such a short amount of time.
Meanwhile, it was still cold and gray and Tuesday morning brought with it freezing rain – enough to hang little icicles on the tree out front and at the beanpod tree back at the apartment. Already, oddly enough, it seemed as though they had been living at the house for months, even after only three days. And the idea of being at the apartment again seemed rather foreign. Although they would return once or twice more to spackle a few places where pictures had been hung, to remove the hooks from the wall where the curtain rods had been set, and various other little things.
Later in the morning, before Collette dropped off OLeif at work, it began to snow. Carrie called, suggesting (from Mom and Dad both) that Collette stay at home that day instead of venturing out on the roads, seeing especially as every single school district in St. Louis was already closed. Carrie was also not being called into work because of the weather.
And so, Collette reluctantly decided to stay home and unpack the bedroom. She had so much work to do with Rose, and she could see the pile growing for Wednesday, provided the roads were safe by then.
It did truly become a white world. By nine o’clock in the morning, the ground was fully covered in what could have been an inch of snow, for all Collette could tell. It was pleasing that St. Louis was finally seeing a decent winter, what with the odd weather patterns (or lack thereof) which were typically experienced during the winter months.
And the snow globe continued. All was quiet out and about.