It was a fantastic day! There was no wind, and while the temperature was a crisp twenty-nine degrees, it didn't feel like it with the sun shining, especially the way it made the new fallen snow glisten. My wife and I happily shoveled the drive together, enjoying the first truly white Christmas in several years. It was the twenty-fourth, and we were enjoying the holiday season, getting ready for the kids and grandkids to show up for the big holiday gathering. The tree was long since up, as well as the lights strung over the house and around the yard. The packages were wrapped and under the tree. Our chores were done with hours to spare, so we felt pretty good taking a short break after shoveling to have, of all things, a snowball fight.
We might have been married for thirty years, but we still knew how to have fun with each other like kids, and a good packing snow was nothing to shy away from.
Snowballs flew back and forth, both of us laughing like the kids we felt like. I couldn't think of a better way to spend the day! I threw a snowball that impacted right on my wife's cute ass as she was bent over packing another to throw at me. She squealed loudly as I ducked around the corner of the garage. I scooped up more snow and carefully packed another ball, waiting for her to come around the corner chasing me. I waited...and waited. Finally I peeked around the corner of the garage, expecting to get a face full of snow. To my horror, I saw my wife on her knees, her hands pressed to her chest, a grimace that looked to be a mixture of pain and surprise on her face as she looked up at me. She slowly toppled over into the snowbank she was kneeling in, laying motionless.
It took me a few moments to realize that she wasn't playing, trying to draw me out so she could plaster me with another snow ball. It was something she had playfully done once before. No, this time was different. I raced to her side and knelt in the snow, reaching her as her eyes fluttered a few times and then closed.
It turned out to be the worst Christmas of my life. A sudden Myocardial infarction they said. No real reason, her heart just decided to stop, they told me. Probably a small nerve problem they hadn't found, but any hope of revival was lost when the ambulance, due to the previous night's snow, took more than forty-five minutes to get there. I did my best to give her CPR. But in the end, she was just as gone as if I hadn't.
Christmas had never been the same since. I tried my best to put on a smile and celebrate, for the sake of the kids and grandkids. The little ones didn't deserve to have Christmas ruined for the rest of their lives.
Each year I got out the tree and put it up, but inside...well inside was hollow. This was the fourth time I'd gone through the ritual without her. It was still two days until Christmas. I had the shopping done, but it just wasn't the same. I still had some wrapping to do, but some of the larger packages had eaten up all the paper I had left. I wasn't about to let my granddaughter have an unwrapped box. My wife would roll over in her grave at such a slight. So off to the store I went at a rather late ten thirty at night.
I wasn't worried about getting there, even though it was snowing heavily. My four wheel drive Silverado pickup truck would go through darn near anything. The cold didn't bother me that much, I'd just put on another layer. No, what did bother me was that four years before, my wife would have been riding with me, laughing and cracking jokes about the few idiot drivers trying to make a go of it in the fresh snow with little front wheel drive squash box cars. Yeah, she would have enjoyed seeing the number of cars stuck in the parking lots as I drove into town.
This close to Christmas I expected Walmart to be a bit busier. I wasn't the only car in the lot, but I could count them without having to take my socks and shoes off. I walked in, got my paper, headed out into the snow, and headed home, toasty warm in the cab as the snow blew across the road in front of me.
The roads were, predictably, worse the farther from town I got. I turned onto the gravel road that was a shortcut to our house, went down the hill, barely even able to see the low-water bridge at the bottom through the blowing snow.
Now, I'm from the great north. You know, where the snow starts in October, and you don't see the grass again until March or April. So for me, what they were calling a blizzard was, well, just a heavy snow flurry. It didn't surprise me that people here had trouble with the snow, it just didn't snow and stick like that. If there was snow on the ground for a whole day, it was newsworthy.
I eased down the hill, expecting to have a few slips and slides, even in my four wheel drive, as I hit the washboard section near the base of the hill. I was more than ready for it. What I wasn't ready for was finding a car crossways, half on and half off the road, on the low-water bridge. I grabbed all the brakes that I could in these conditions and slid to a stop less than two feet from the ill-fated vehicle. I could easily go around it, but the good Samaritan in me said to stop and check to see if they needed help. I pulled my coat tight, zipped it, pulled my hat down low to brace against the wind and stepped out, making my way to the car, which I could now see was teetering on the edge of the concrete bridge. It wasn't like it would fall far, the water was only two feet below the edge of the bridge, and the pool of water, only three or so feet deep. Enough to make a mess of a car, but not enough to be overly dangerous, unless of course you decided to go for a midnight swim in the fifteen degree wind.
"Holy shit!" I muttered to myself as I stepped around the car and found the mostly frozen form of a young woman. The water that clearly soaked her clothing was starting to freeze her into a block of ice. She had to have fallen into the water and pulled herself up and out, only to sit and freeze. I reached down and was surprised to see her look up, her face ashen and her trembling lips blue.
"hhhhhhelpppppp mmmmmmmeeeeee?" she stuttered amid her uncontrollable shaking.
