Untitled - CSUN ScholarWorks - California State University, Northridge

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fast acting train engineer, waiting for her new psychiatrist
and the ambulance to arrive and take her away to the
hospital again. I imagine my mother didn't sleep that night.
Although, perhaps she did. It is the nights my aunt is alone
in her condo that my mother worries most.
Sometimes I think my mother had five children as a
form_of insurance against being left alone in the world. But,
of course, she had had all of us long before she lost first her
brother to heat stroke, then her mother to cancer, and now
her sister to insanity.
After Gerda escapes the old witch's eternal blooming
garden, she travels on in search of her friend Kai. She meets
up and visits a fairy tale prince and princess who dress her
in fine clothes and give her a carriage to travel in. While
journeying in the carriage, Gerda is attacked and captured
by an outlaw band and forced to become a playmate for a
little spoiled girl who is the daughter of the leader. The
robber girl takes pity on her though and when the doves in
the robber's lair tell Gerda that Kai has been taken to the
Snow Queen's castle far away in the north, the robber girl
helps her escape on a reindeer.
The winter before my husband and I moved to
Southern California, the weather in North Dakota was
particularly severe. Nearly every weekend in January, there
was a blizzard. About dusk on Friday night, the winds
would start to pick up and the snow on the ground would
blow and begin to drift. Snow blows from the sides of the
roads, where it has been plowed up off of the road. Sifting
down, sifting down over and over, until the road begins to
fill back up. The snow doesn't drift in smoothly for one
even coating--it drifts in parts, creating a series of bare
polished ice spots interrupted by peaked furrows of fine,
compacted snow. When you drive through it, it is like
traveling on the water during high winds, the waves rising
up into ridges against the front bottom of the boat like solid