A Blanket of Snow

Photo credit: taken from Facebook Group, Parga Paradise, posted February 8, 2017 by Lloyd Gowland who credited the original post of Rosario Grazioso.

A small sprinkling of snow, like the shake of a snow globe can create a scene of beauty and is a tolerable situation.

An even coating, perhaps a few centimeters, is a bit of a nuisance but barely disrupts the flow of life.

A heavy blanket, however, one that stops traffic, closes businesses and blocks the television satellite programing is respite from the unruly spin of daily routine. I for one, welcome it. (Retirees, this is not meant for you, and stop telling me how great your life is).

In Your Own Kind, such an event brings a group of people closer in proximity, maybe more than some want, though for others the closeness cements their budding relationships.

. . . Uncle Mike had said the little village would be dead until after the new year, but Sarah didn't see it that way. Yes, it's true. The tourists were gone, the restaurant often empty and mostly she worked on weekend evenings. But for her, this place was more alive than it had ever been. 
          She and Alexandros explored the cliffs in front of the lighthouse, and sometimes they would have the pleasant surprise of coming up over a boulder to see a group of harbor seals resting on the rocks ahead. And if they were very still they would have several minutes to watch them close-up before their intrusion was detected and the seals would jump from the rocks and disappear back into the sea. There were days to fish with homemade rods that they made from the long reeds they pulled from the lake. And when the first snow arrived, Alexandros' friend, Eagle, took them to the beach and showed them, with some old skis and poles that were in the restaurant basement, how to ski on a flat surface, an activity neither of them had ever done. Then when a Nor'easter blew up the coast and buried the village in a white blanket of snow, cutting power for three days and causing the New Year's celebration at the town hall to be cancelled, they took the skis and drew lines in the snow from north to south and back again.
          Minos invited the restaurant workers to stay at his house because he had a generator, which kept the heat running. A few of the cooks took him up on it, as did Sarah, but Minos' wife warned them all in English and in Greek to behave in front of the children. 
          "No bad words, and no hanky-pankying each other." She'd learned some of her English from American movies. 
          Eventually, as with every year before that one, the gray days began to lengthen and winter began to slowly melt away. . .

Your Own Kind, The Nifi and Among the Zinnias are available in paperback or as ebooks. And they're free if you have Kindle Unlimited. I hope you will give one of them a try!

 

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