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 fit 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 inMadisonSquareGarden.Iimmediatelyscrappedmyotherplans.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 flat.
Eventually, fortified with a bowl of hot oatmeal and jamming the hard-earned coins into our pockets, we set out on the twenty-block journey—a city mile.