“Sounds like you dropped a library.” Lauren laughed.
That was as graceful as my dance with Jake, Arden murmured to herself.
She picked up the fallen clothes, and then pushed all the hangers to one end of the closet to give herself room.
Here we go again, she thought, leaping into the air.
Arden’s fingers snagged the end of the quilt, and, at the very last minute, she yanked it off, grunting at its unexpected heft.
As Arden descended, she saw white, and wondered if she had hit her head.
But as she looked up, she smiled: It was snowing.
Falling all around her were hundreds of homemade snowflakes—their lacy silhouettes softly drifting about, as if she were trapped in a snow globe.
Mom and I made those decades ago, Arden thought, remembering when they used to hang the snowflakes on the cabin’s windows at the holidays.
Arden sat down on the floor as if pulled by force, and pulled the quilt around herself, watching it snow, finding herself in the middle of an unexpected blizzard of memories.
When it stopped, Arden gathered the snowflakes into a pile and stretched out, resting her head on them.
She held up a snowflake—the paper yellowed, the edges bent—and ran her fingers over it, before doing the same to the quilt. Arden shut her eyes, and listened to the sounds of the cabin. It always seemed to have a life of its own, like the seasons in Michigan.
Arden sighed and slowly drifted to sleep in a pile of newly fallen pretend-snow.
Thirty-one
November 1977
“It’s a winter wonderland,” Lolly yelled from the front window of the cabin. “Arden, hurry! Come look!”
Arden padded downstairs in her stocking feet and peered toward Lost Land Lake. She couldn’t even see the dock.
“But it’s not winter yet,” Arden said. “It’s only November.”
Always so logical, Lolly thought, smiling at her daughter.
“C’mon! We have to check this out,” Lolly said, pulling Arden by the hand and opening the door to the screened porch. “Wow!”
Snow was blowing through the screens and already drifting onto the wood floor. Lolly pulled her daughter out onto the porch and said, “Ssssh! Listen.”
The snow hissed in the air as it fell, but, beyond that, the world was silent, hushed, buried.
Snow was as common in Scoops as pine trees and deer. The first snow typically fell around Halloween, grew heavier in November, and often continued into early April. The town received over two hundred inches of snow a year, thanks to its close proximity to Lake Michigan. Much of the heavy snow—like today’s—came from a weather phenomenon called lake effect, in which arctic air routinely moved across the relatively warmer waters of the big lake, causing a dumping effect, almost as if the town were located at the wrong end of a snow blower.
“Scoops should have been named Shovels.” Les laughed from the cabin. He put on his gloves and pulled a ski mask over his face, until only his eyes and lips were visible. He grabbed his red plaid thermos of coffee and said, “Time to make some cash. I’ll see my beautiful girls later.”
In the winters, Les Lindsey led ice-fishing excursions for the hearty, or, as his wife put it, “the crazy.” Locals loved to ice fish in the many inland lakes, like Lost Land, that dotted the area. It was as popular as skiing, snowshoeing, and building snowmen. The weather didn’t matter much to sportsmen because Les did most of the work anyway. He put up the shanties that kept out the snow and wind, and which kept the fishermen warm; he cut the hole in the ice; he kept them fed and jovial with his “special” coffee; and he told them all the stories of the big fish he had pulled from holes in the ice, just like the ones that were about to jump on their dangling lines any second now.
Arden watched her father trudge through the snow, which was already up to his knees. After only a few feet, he became a ghost. And then, he was gone.
It was snowing so hard that the world had become one-dimensional, white on white.
Arden felt as if she were trapped in a snow globe that had been shaken. There was no color differential between the sky, the ground, the world. It was a blur of white.
The happy screams of children shattered the silence.
“They refuse to get up on a school day”—Lolly laughed, mussing Arden’s hair—“but they will jump out of bed on a snow day.”
Although the joke in town was that the school district only called a snow day “when the bus drivers could no longer see the stop signs or the school,” there were days when the kids might have gotten to school but could never have gotten home.
This was one of those days.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Lolly asked, a big smile etched on her face. “Everything looks so fresh and new. And it makes me feel like a kid again.”