When it snows, I remember the winter I felt swallowed up. After a long night of the wind roaring, and singing, Snow had buried our house. My bedroom window showed a white nothing outside world. It looked that way through every window of the house. No street lamp. No house across the street. No driveway. No mailbox. No trees. Only white. It was the realest, wildest winter I can remember.

Outside in the cold white, everything was hidden- including me up to my neck. There I was in my. own front yard, and yet I really I didn’t know where I was. The bushes, the place where the grass ended and the driveway started, and the steps to my front door, were all erased. Playtime that winter was all about discovering and exploring. We could do things that we had never done before and never did again. We made forts big enough to fit three people inside. We sled off the roof of our house. We didn’t look before we crossed the street. We made a whole family of snow people. We could look out for miles from the tops of snow piles taller than Abraham Lincoln.

For two long weeks, I wondered. I wondered if I would ever see the green grass again. I wondered if the tree in my front window would stretch taller toward a sunny sky, wake up, and get dressed in green. I wondered if I would ever see the robin again singing just outside my window, or bobbing around in the green grass. I wondered if the tulips that grew along the sidewalk would poke up.

We had a state of emergency for the first time in my life. At age 10, that meant my dad and three other neighbor dads had to walk a few miles to the grocery store in a sled because there was no food in the house. There was were no cars on the road. Who knew if there was food for sale at the grocery store?. When they turned the corner, I wondered if we would see them again.

The blizzard happened in January. But it took until late April for the trees to dress up in green. The grass was all sloshy. But the green got deeper with the sunshine. The blades were thick. The tulips had tripled. And the robin did come back and build a nest right in the tree outside my front window, laid three eggs, and one spring morning, I heard singing again and I didn’t think a wink about what had happened just a short time ago. Everything had been swallowed up by spring.