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After wearing a damp coat and stocking cap for the last hour, I felt chilled, and I was hoping the heavy wool blanket would help me warm up. We kept a blanket in the living room for just such a purpose, and this particular blanket had been issued to my brother when he served in the U.S. Army. That's what was stamped on the edge of the blanket: "U.S. Army."
"It's snowing," I announced to my mother as I sat down on the couch and reached for the olive-drab wool blanket to wrap around my shoulders.
The snow had started while we were milking. Every night after supper I went out to the barn with Dad. It was my job to carry milk to the milkhouse, and after the milker came off the last cow, it was my job to feed the calves. Once the calves had finished drinking their buckets of milk and the buckets had been rinsed and stacked, my chores were done. Dad still had to feed hay, but he said he didn't need my help to do that.
Each time I carried a bucket of milk to the milkhouse, when I returned to the barn, my coat and stocking cap were covered with a layer of snowflakes that began to melt as soon as I went back inside. On my way to the house, I had stopped for a minute to admire the fluffy feathery flakes as they fell from the black sky.
Across the room, my mother occupied the big easy chair next to the window where she always sat. The davenport, she said, was too low, which made it difficult for her to stand up.
"It's snowing?" Mom said, turning her attention away from the television to look at me. "Very hard?"
I shook my head. "It started when we were halfway through milking. There's maybe only about an inch on the ground so far."
"Well," she said, "I hope it doesn't snow too much. Dad and I are supposed to go Christmas shopping tomorrow afternoon."
My mother had never learned to drive, and after she had been stricken by polio sixteen years before I was born, the paralysis made it impossible for her to learn how. If she wanted to go somewhere, she always had to rely on Dad or my brother or my sister to take her.
"What time did the television show start?" I asked.
"Just a little while ago," Mom replied.
Every year a few weeks before the holidays when the Christmas specials began appearing on television, my mother liked to watch them after she had finished washing the supper dishes. The shows featured different entertainers who sang Christmas songs and performed elaborate dance routines with groups of pretty ladies wearing Santa hats and short red dresses trimmed with white fur.
To be honest, I preferred Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer,