Now We Are Six, Laura Edition

A romanticized view of winter storms, but it's my view

Did you imagine yourself in The Long Winter with the Ingalls family?

And then when you grew up did you search
(ever so anachronistically, on the interwebs)
for a small coffee grinder, powered by hand,

the kind that Ma and the girls used for wheat --
the seed wheat for next year
 that became, painstakingly, flour
and then bread for the coldest days?

Did you imagine running a rope line to the barn for safety's sake?

In case a whiteout kept Pa from seeing the house?

 Did you read by gas lamp or firelight
and sigh with the thrill of the word:
blizzard
?

A snow day or two can bring that out in me.

The Suite family is busy with school this January.
Our last snowstorm is reduced
to these photos and the murky piles of ice
in mall parking lots.
The big yellow bus traverses our road twice a day again.
The horse trough no longer steams in a sigh of relative warmth.
But we still read by candlelight for fun.
Little House Seven Miles from Small Town
...that's us...