Chucking Rocks at the River

Her purple mittens gripped my gloves, loud laughter boiling out of her chili-pepper-curve smile. Breath held, I reveled in the contrast of the pale blue world against her rich cocoa eyes.

We shuffled out onto the ice - an inlet pond along Lake Michigan's coastline. Nervous giggles, the crisp air of danger, an inch at a time. In reality, we weren't taking much of a risk: were we to actually fall through, the sloped beach laid ready to catch us mere inches beneath our boots.

So how did a twenty-year-old girl from Texas and a thirty-five-year-old woman from Mexico City end up meeting each other at a frozen college in Milwaukee? If I believed in fate...

Neither of us had seen real snow before. The kind of prolonged cold that iced brick sidewalks and froze over seagull rivers. We were both like young kid - bundled up, freezing, grinning, chucking rocks over the railing to watch them crash through the solid water far below.

"Watch this one!" Andrea held a grey stone high above her head in both hands, triumphant. Any normal person would have called it ridiculous, the joy over throwing a rock at some ice. But she and I came from the same place. We were both swept up in this new wonderland.

I cheered, enthralled, as she pitched the rock down into the river. A satisfying crack revealed a fracturing dent in the layer of ice; we hadn't found a rock large enough to break through... yet.