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CEDARVILLE
REVIEW
32
Making Mountains out of
Snow Mounds
nonfiction By Sharon Rose
After the snowplow, the parking lot was rimmed with four or five feet glistening in the sun. They
called to us with their peaks, an amalgamation of snow and pavement chunks.
I hoisted you on top by your armpits, and I straightened your knitted butterfly cap over your ears.
Stay in the middle, stay close to me.
We were mountain climbers, explorers, trying to make it across an impossible expanse from the
Crook’s farm to the vegetable garden behind the parsonage. Our breath froze in the air, hovering
in fog before dispersing—we could only see each puff for a decimal of a moment.
You kept tugging your hands away—you wanted to bend your caked mittens in just the right way so
that the snow would grid and crack along the knitted lines, perfectly geometrical. Stay over here,
please, I mean it. You’re going to fall.
Then the mountaintops grew shorter and shorter until we were only a foot above the ground. And
then you were just a little kid shivering in the cold and clinging to my damp jean leg, and I was the
one who could save you.
I managed to push you back inside the glass doors and into the foyer by the wall of Missionaries,
leaving the slush and frozen ground behind us.
And then I kneaded your hands until their color—and the light in your eyes—returned.