Snow Flake

We drove up the snowy, winding road towards the cozy A-frame cabin. It was one in a row of seven identical A-frames, like a stuttering alphabet.

“Which one is ours?” my little brother asked.

“Number three,” said Dad, counting from the right before reconsidering to count from the left. “Or maybe that one?”

Our parents rented the cabin for a family vacation. Well, Dad did. Mom was vying for a sunny beachfront escape. She loved a good suntan.

But Dad grew up in the Midwest and desperately wanted his family to share his nostalgia for a white Christmas. This was his last ditch chance for a Norman Rockwell-ian gathering before my sister threatened to break up the band by heading off to college next year. I think he imagined the whole family building snowmen and taking sleigh rides and singing Christmas carols. Never mind not a one of us could carry a tune.

We loaded up the station wagon and went the wrong way on the Oregon trail, heading eastward from our home in rainy Portland to a colder form of precipitation one-hundred and ninety-eight miles away. My two younger brothers got carsick at mile posts fifteen and sixteen, respectively.

As soon as we crossed the pass, the clouds cleared.

“What is that strange yellow orb glowing in the sky?” my sister asked in her best bad sci-fi flick voice.

Mom looked up through the windshield.

“I bet I could get a good tan if I lay on the roof rack,” she said.

My puking brothers eagerly volunteered to join her atop the station wagon like stagecoach bandits. Dad was having none of it. Everyone would ride inside with seatbelts buckled.

“But Marcy is in Florida,” Mom said for the umpteenth time.

Marcy, our next door neighbor, was visiting her sister in Miami who owned a condo with a pool. Marcy promised to return “brown as a berry.”

“It’s not fair,” said Mom. "She's cheating."

Dad gripped the steering wheel.

Mom spent summers stretched out on a plastic lounge chair, slathered in baby oil. Usually, she stopped tanning after Labor Day. But this September had been unseasonably warm. October started off relatively mild. Everyday when we got home from school, we’d find Mom in the backyard in her bathing suit. My sister rolled her eyes and retreated to her room. I’d make my little brothers healthy snacks and plop them in front of the TV. Then I’d grab a handful of Oreos, head outside, and perch on the foot of the lounge chair to regale Mom with funny stories about my school day. Some of them were true.

I liked to make Mom laugh. She had the prettiest smile. She never opened her eyes, though. She didn’t want to risk white eyelids. Ever since Marcy signed up for monthly membership at the new Eternal Sun Tanning Beds, Mom was obsessed with a “natural” tan. She said Marcy’s had the telltale white eye mask due to the protective goggles required in tanning beds.

“She looks like a reverse raccoon,” said Mom.

Supper was always on the table by the time Dad got home from work so he didn’t fully realize how much of Mom’s life was spent working on her tan.

“Just look at all that snow!” said Dad.

Acres of pristine white snow stretched out before us. It snuggled into the branches of pine trees. It capped the cabins’ pointed rooftops. Under a cloudless, azure blue sky, the snow glared as bright as a hundred watt bulb.

Mom rolled down the window.

“It’s cold,” she said.

“The cabins have snowshoes and toboggans,” Dad said enthusiastically.

This was not the draw he imagined.

Everyone helped unload the car. The couple in cabin four watched through their window. I don’t think they saw me wave.

My sister and I called dibs on the bedroom in back, next to my parents’ room. The little boys climbed the ladder to the loft and triumphantly staked their claim. I pretended to be jealous less they wise up and demand a room they could actually stand up in without banging their heads.

My sister got busy unpacking all kinds of clothes that made no sense for ten snowbound days in a cabin. She hung five dresses on the open rack that would serve as a closet for both of us. Her three pairs of heels, flip flops, and powder blue leather flats, she lined up under the bed nearest the window. She’d also packed two bikinis because she was sure the cabin had a hot tub. It did not.

I left most of my clothes in my suitcase but was bartering for a single wire hanger from my fashion-obsessed sister when something flickered past the bedroom window.

“What was that?” my sister asked

We both ran to the window to see our mother trudging across the snow dressed in her pastel pink bathrobe and slippers. With each step, she sunk shin-deep into white. Mom clutched closed the front of her robe with one hand. With the other, she pulled a toboggan on a rope. She slowly made her way to the center of the clearing, far from the shadows of the pine trees. She snugged the toboggan into the snow, leveling it the way you might stick a matchbook under the leg of a wobbling table. Then Mom dropped her robe and stretched out on the toboggan wearing nothing but her two-piece swimsuit and the shine of suntan lotion.

“Oh dear God!” My sister gasped. “What does she think she’s doing?”

“Suntanning,” I said.

That’s when I noticed the couple in the next A-frame looking out their window looking at us looking at Mom. The woman shook her head and yanked their green curtains closed. My sister wanted to do the same. I argued we needed to keep an eye on Mom for safety reasons.

“I read in National Geographic about a mountain climber who got frostbite and his fingers snapped off his hands like icicles,” I said. “We don’t want Mom to lose her fingers.”

“Her fingers? She’s lost her flipping mind,” said my sister.

Just then, Dad peeked his head through our bedroom doorway.

“If we hurry, we can make it to the U-cut tree farm before dark,” he said.

My sister and I did not even turn our heads. Like gawkers at a road accident, we were weirdly mesmerized by the scene outside our window.

“What is it?” Dad asked coming to see for himself. I think he expected cute wild rabbits or a hungry deer. What he saw was his wife turning over like a rotisserie chicken to brown her other side.

The three of us stood together saying nothing for what seemed like a long time. After a while, my little brothers climbed down from the loft to see what all the quiet was about. They joined us by the window. Even they remained in silent reverence as though watching a television tuned to a favorite channel. Mom reached back with both hands to unhook her swimsuit top.

“She hates tan lines,” I explained like Marlin Perkins narrating the peculiarities of a wild animal.

Dad seemed a little surprised — or was it impressed? — that I knew this particular detail about our mother. My siblings were neither surprised nor impressed. We’d all bore witness to Mom’s dramatic, albeit gradual, transformation from hobby tanner to bonafide cuckoo-nuts obsessive.

But I think seeing Mom in her swimsuit in the snow on a toboggan risking not only the ridicule of strangers but also the real possibility of frostbite, brought it into sharp focus for all of us.

“Mom had her heart set on Florida,” said Dad. “I think we all know what we need to do.”

And, somehow, we did.

My little brothers were first out the door wearing nothing but their white Y-front skivvies. Dad pulled on silly candy cane striped boxer shorts and fleece-lined snow boots. He grabbed the plastic shower curtain from the bathroom. He told me to bring the six-pack of soda from the fridge. My sister handed me her pink bikini but changed her mind. She decided to wear that one herself.

The two of us tiptoed through the snow, following our mother’s footsteps in more ways than one. Dad spread the shower curtain out on the snow like a beach towel on the sand. Mom opened her eyes, smiled, and rolled, in one graceful move, from sled to curtain. Dad took his seat beside her. There was enough room for everyone under the brilliant sun.