There can be no doubt that he must have been really tired, there can be no mistake about that. But that wouldn’t have occurred to me then. In the country, or rather, my small rural town, the snow was clean and white; not like the city snow. City snow is only an inconvenience. And is dirty and squalid almost immediately, worried by the city, by the pollution of cars and urban living.

But then, because I was young, the snow was brilliant and beautiful. It was one of those magical days just before Christmas. My brother and I had been lured outside by the snow, the new snow, the heavy snow, and best of all, packing snow. And while it was early still, it was December, and it wasn’t that early. The sun had already set. But it was still that kind of dark that isn’t dark. The world was snow-covered. The memory is a sparkling purple. And while we played and worked for hours, I don’t remember the light changing. Dusk lasted all night. There was a lot of snow and we had quite a big backyard.

My brother persuaded me away from making a family of snowmen. Instead, we were going to build the best snowfort our town had ever seen. We had an abundance of snow. And, with nothing better to do with our youth, we had an abundance of time. And it was not so long after we had started, that, into that perpetual purple dusk, into that snow-glazed childscape, came my Dad. His voice was normally gruff and robust but it was softened and blanketed by the snow: “Hey, boys. What’s going on here?”

Dad never came home early from the farm. He also never took vacations and he didn’t take days off, either. Not Sundays, not Thanksgiving, not Christmas. So it was really something for Dad to come home so early. Dad would usually come home from the farm and hurry dinner, perhaps play with my brother and myself for a few minutes, and then melt into the living room furniture to watch a hockey game or a night of sitcoms. Instead, he joined us.

Dad seemed inexhaustible and we worked for hours. We used so much of the snow. Dad covered the tray part of an old wagon with a plastic sheet he had in his car and then poured steaming hot water into it. He explained that hot water froze faster. And I remember that it froze very fast even though I don’t remember being cold. We used two or three of these oversized ice cubes as windows in our fort. It was well into the night. Mother had no doubt giving up trying to save dinner. But there was no question that we had done it. We had built the best snowfort our town had ever seen, or at least the best snowfort I had ever seen in our town.

SS