Thirty-four years ago today we were married on a day when snow fell unexpectedly thick and fast, the air a veil of white we ran through, me in my wedding dress, your sister and my sister in green velvet and holding the train of my dress as we dashed across the street from the getting ready room to the church where you waited, your brother standing next to you and your three best friends since kindergarten ushering everyone to their seats. We were lucky - it was only a brief snow shower, and by the time the reception started the sky was clear and cold and full of stars. My grandpa got drunk as a lord and after the reception shut down took a cab to the Catholic War Vets hall where he drank more with some fellow Sea Bees he knew back in the day. Later he would have to walk down the steps to the guest bedroom backwards so as not to fall down, a feat he nearly got away with except grandma heard him and wouldn’t even admit she only heard him because she was up sneaking cigarettes, as if we didn’t know.
A lot of people had a great time at our wedding but I was not one of them. The marrying part was the best part but the reception was so odd. I found myself suddenly having to talk to parents who had disowned me for years, because we lived together. Once we got married you can’t say mom and dad were hypocrites, they picked up right where they left off in my pre-harlot of Babylon days, acting as if they had never shunned me, as if I had never called them month after month, sobbing and begging for them to please please not hate me. Their sudden nonchalant nothing-to-see-here total acceptance of me left me dazed, confused, and if not exactly happy then at least relieved that they hadn’t found a way to ruin the day. The main thing I remember about that day was the way the cold made everyone seem warm and happy, and your smiling face.
My first trip home after our divorce was final Aunt B. said, well better luck next time. She meant to be funny because that’s her way, but I told her that with you I had had the best luck I was likely to ever have when it came to picking husbands, and that I didn’t consider a marriage that lasted nineteen years a failure, and she agreed.
Today I drove up to Tahoe, staying just down the road from the place where I was married the second and final time to my husband, with whom you share many qualities. A big snowstorm is expected tonight, they are predicting five feet of snow at Donner Pass, where once upon a time a long time ago four dozen people, mostly women and children, died on a pioneering quest to California from Missouri. Half of the travelers made it, while half were buried in graves whose remnants we passed within a few yards of this morning, making the run down the mountain to Truckee in our trusty four wheel drive.
I walked these snowy streets, these trails with you in the winter of 2000, both of us new skiers meeting up with work friends M. and T. and their hard drinking crew of buddies. That same year we met P. and M. in Mexico to scuba dive, then turned around and headed to Tahoe to get some turns in, returning to the city on New Year’s Eve to eat at Cafe Kati’s on Sutter (gone now), having stood at the bottom of the ocean and at the top of the world - our world, anyway, the one we were living in California - in a 48 hour period.
The leading edge of the storm has arrived, the snow is falling steady and hard, almost sheeting. It is a wet snow, perfect for snowballs. Out my window, the snow accumulates quickly on the ground, the great stands of pines that line the trail where I walk with my dog wear fluffy white choir robes. When I say your name aloud, my breath clouding the cold air, they respond with only a sepulchral silence.