All up in here.

The Santa Clause was playing on a December evening at the Falls Theater, and my husband and toddler and I walked downtown from our duplex a few blocks away.  It was Alex’s first trip to a movie theater, and his face was fixed on the large screen, no matter that he didn’t quite follow the plot. When we came out of the show, snow was falling in large tufts and about four inches had collected on the ground. The sky glowed in a weird orange the way it gets in a Wisconsin winter that time of night. We walked towards Prairie Street in the falling snow and didn’t see a car or another body the whole way home. Snowflakes were so big that even a 3 year-old atop his dad’s shoulders could throw back his head and catch them in his mouth. It’s the closest I’ve come to feeling the tranquility of life inside a snow globe. Remember this, remember this, the writer and mother inside of me said at the time. I looked back over my shoulder to see our footprints on the snowy sidewalk. Years later the marriage ended, the boy grew into a man, and that short walk home is still one of my sweetest memories. My favorite winter pastime continues to be walking after dark in a fresh-fallen snow, making the first tracks with a companion or two.