Let it Snow...

Dear Marianne,

On Monday the snow lay thick and flossy on the ground, we woke knowing something was different. I held up Anna and Mike so that they could look out of the hallway window at the top of the stairs. They were excited to the point of hysteria and ran to every window, just to check that the snow was really there. Becky was delighted to read on her school’s website that the building was closed except for those who “needed to be in”. I didn’t suggest that might be her. Half way through the morning she received a text to say that a classmate had died unexpectedly at the weekend. Later she went out with friends and they consoled each other and had a snowball fight in the middle of their shock.

The last time we had snow like this was April when we went to the cricket pitch on the common to “say goodbye” to uncle Mike and play a game of cricket in his honour. Mike had died suddenly of something in his lung. He was a hippy type of fellow and lived up a mountain in California in a log cabin he built with his wife Linda. He didn’t want a funeral, or any fuss really, so his wife and friends scattered his ashes around his beloved meadow on top of his mountain; they drank Budweiser and smoked joints all night.

Half way across the world, we took the kids to the place he had seen his only cricket match, he loved cricket, although his only contact with the game was through the world service, which delivered giggly British schoolboy commentary all the way up there in the woods. We were thrown by the arrival of snow on a mid April morning, and the fact that we couldn’t find our cricket stuff, but determined to see our plan through, we put a badminton set in the boot of the car and headed off to the common. When we got there we made a snowman, threw snowballs, played a game of snow badminton and toasted Mike with Budweiser and Coke.

This snowy Monday I should have been at a funeral, but the “weather event” stopped me even contemplating getting in to my car and heading north. I am still in that dizzy world of disbelief about the death of this old family friend, she was too young and it was unexpectedly sudden. So I think that if she turned up at the door right now, I would be less surprised than I am to find that she is not here at all.

She was like the big sister you can’t have for real - she was kind, she listened to all my teenage angst nonsense, she was fun and encouraging and a constant feature of my teenage years. She was my real big sisters best friend and my big brother’s girl friend.

Later we would meet as adults, and share stories of life after all that stuff, but she is very firmly there in my childhood memories. Small moments, such as when she lent me her new, cool wellies, and wasn’t cross when I messed them up, or the time she came to say goodnight to me and in my sleep I swore at her and she laughed, or the time she bought me a proper grown up present: white musk talc in a shiny black ball the size of my hand, which you twisted to open; it looked so cool, it smelled lovely and it was so sophisticated.

I didn’t get to her funeral, but with all the kids off school, we played in the snow, baked cakes, read stories, cooked a roast and toasted Sally with a ropey wine we found in the fridge. I think it was a fine way to say goodbye.