朱莉安娜·C.纳什 /Juliana C. Nash
I knew it was snowing before I opened my eyes. I could hear the sounds of shovels scraping against the sidewalks, and there was that special quiet in the air that comes when the city is heavily blanketed with snow. I ran to the windows in the front room to have a look at the block-my domain. It must have been very early. None of my friends had made it to the street; only janitors were moving about in the knee-deep snow. Relieved that I hadn't missed anything, I became aware that my sisters and brothers were now awake. I had no time to waste. If I hurried, I could be out there before any of my friends.
I dressed myself in an assortment of hand-me-down winter woolens, but there would be no mittens to keep my hands warm. I had lost them earlier in the season. I was in a real dither as to what to put on my feet; my shoes no longer f it into my rubber galoshes. I could wear shoes or galoshes, but not both. I decided to go with two pairs of socks and the galoshes.
As I was buckling them, I felt the presence of someone standing over me. It was my big brother, Lenny. He asked me if I wanted to go ice-skating at the indoor rink in Madison Square Garden. I immediately scrapped my other plans. My thirteen-year-old brother was actually asking me, his nine-year-old sister, to go ice-skating with him. Go? Of course I would go. But where would we get the money? Lenny said it would cost a dollar to get in and rent the skates. Only two obstacles stood between me and going skating with my brother-the blizzard of 1948 and one dollar. The blizzard I could handle-it was the dollar that presented the problem.
The quest began. We returned some milk bottles, asked our mother for a nickel, begged our father for a quarter apiece, collected a penny or two from coat pockets, discovered two coins that had rolled under the beds, and spotted a rare stray dime nestled in a corner of one of the six rooms in our cold-water railroad f lat.