Two days ago it snowed, a light fluffy, non sticky snow, the stuff of bitter cold weather and bright clear skies. Yesterday it blew, and the crisp edges of the driveway were blurred into little duney drifts. Around town, those stretches of road with no windbreaks were heaped up with snow. It was just the like snow on the stretch of County A starting just in front of my parents’ old house and heading east. It was a Bermuda Triangle-esque stretch of country road, where any bit of wind would sweep the snow off of the flat, plowed fields and send it racing across the prairie, to be caught and heaped up on the roadway. We kids always thought that those swirling eddies of snow across the two lane road looked like the action of hockey players, racing and jostling across the ice. Every winter, people heading east out of Janesville would be caught unawares by the treacherous stretch of windswept road just past the farmhouse, and they’d end up in the ditch. Ours was the nearest house, and the drivers would inevitably end up at our back door, asking to use the phone, back in the day when cell phones weren’t a thing. The kitchen phone was wall-mounted with a curly white cord that cold easily stretch into the unheated “back room” as we called it; I know because perched on the washing machine was the only place that anyone could have a private conversation in the house. If mom was home alone with us kids, she’d make any single men make the call from the back room, with the door shut firmly between us and them, the white coil of cord mashed in the door jamb. If there was a woman or kids however, a spot was generally cleared for them at the kitchen table. One time, dad even gave the mom and kids donuts. But that was a time that the mom was crying because she’d hit a farm dog in the road further up the way, not because of snow.
That swirly, windy, country snow would sometimes appear pink, as the debris from the silos filled with drying soybeans at the farm across the road would dust the top layers of it pink. One winter the snow heaped up dirty brown on the bottom, clean white next, and a pinkish layer on the top that looked for all the world like a cross section of the Neopolitan ice cream in the half-gallon box container in the freezer compartment of the house on County A.