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Out of all the winters when we went back East, to Northern Virginia, for Christmas, it only fully snowed one time. The house was warm, too warm as they often are back East, and snug but when I pressed my hand into the double paned window of my husband’s childhood bedroom, where my small children now slept, it was very, very cold. Outside all was silence, all was quickly white. Snow drifted past the streetlight on the corner at a sharp angle. Soon the road itself was covered, the sidewalks.

There was such a sharp distance I thought then between inside and out, between the hurried, crowded, noisy world of this family house and the deep silence and calm without.

I did not belong in that house, not in any part of it and I was unwelcome in many rooms, at several tables, on many chairs but when I looked outside, away from my children sleeping I felt a great sheltering of clean, white snow, snow that covered the suffering gardens, the tops of the family sedans, the roofs of the upscale development houses. This house was on a cul de sac and it was almost Christmas. Traffic was sparse and then it was nil. Upstairs there was merriment of a sort, traditions, the hiss of the wall heaters, the loud guffaws of people who had drunk their fill and then others’, as well.

I always read my small sons two books, short books and then I stayed until they were asleep. My mother-in-law disapproved. She thought they should just go down to sleep by themselves and that I should rejoin my husband at her table for the family games. I didn’t want to. I disapproved of her disapproval. I wanted to sit at my husband’s childhood desk and watch the snow fall and I did that for many hours, long into that snowy night, until the streetlight finally went out and all was glow, moonlight and silence.