The beam of the car headlights framed flakes as they drifted, barely there. “Well, kids–it’s really snow,” said our dad. Snow. Snow. We stared out the front windshield and talked loudly. The faint precipitation didn’t rate the stir going on in our vehicle. Dad finally told us to settle down.

But we had been waiting for months–since September, when we had flown out of Bangkok, landed exhausted in New York City, and ridden through the night with patient friends to my dad’s family home out in the country. We soon moved to a turn-of-the-century house in town, some of the antique furnishings intact. Often, we drove our station wagon out into the rolling green and wooded countryside, visiting family, friends, or churches that hosted us with potlucks. We’d glided along smooth, quiet roads and eaten meatballs at farmhouses and wondered at carpeted bathrooms. But with snow, we’d know we were really in America, seeing the seasons as the books said they were supposed to be.

Not long after those first wimpy driftings, snow became familiar and deep. We avoided stepping in it in our Sunday shoes and stockings. I got out of the car one night and was surprised to see a glow outdoors, bright enough to provide a quasi-daylight. The lights of the town were reflecting off the snow and clouds on an overcast evening.

The four of us were outfitted in good quality second-hand coats and hardy boots and gloves. We played outside with the neighbor kids, my sister and I each layered in two pairs of pants that held the chilly wet off long enough to let us kneel to build snow forts. We made snowmen and went sledding in a little walled-off backyard. When we came inside, energized and red-faced from our exertions in the cold, our legs stung as we warmed up. Then, dry and sheltered, we played with our dolls in our room, watched TV, and ate family meals together at the table.

New York winter made sure it was snowy for a good long time, and we got our fill of it. In our morning routine, my sister and I got up when it was still dark and dressed by the metal grate that brought up heat from the basement. Then we went down the dim stairway to the small linoleum-floored kitchen, which was always bright and warm, and where my mom served breakfasts like hot oatmeal. The radio was always on–J. Vernon McGee was featured at that hour, with his “How Firm a Foundation” opening hymn. At school, we wore jumpers with collared shirts, and played foursquare in the basement.

We still went for country drives. My impression is that they were always after dark, that the radio played a soothing program called “Night Sounds,” and that the heater would blast until, cramped and hot, we shed our thick outerwear, surrendering item by item. Our Christmas in 1985, the year we arrived in New York, we had an early family celebration with a heavily tinseled tree and a life-sized newborn baby doll my mom picked out for me. Then after the school Christmas play one evening, we climbed into the station wagon for an all-night drive to Florida, with no restrictions on riding in the very back for a bit more sleeping room.

The long season of snow had another side, however, one brought on by days that were overcast and too soon over, bringing on the night before dinner time. I felt the winter pressing in when I began to have an overpowering worry that my little brother would be kidnapped by strangers–our family had had a short “stranger talk” while still overseas, and my concern had become less of a sensible vigilance and more of a general horror of the whole phenomenon. I began to follow the carefree, skidoo-suited seven-year-old to make sure he made a safe journey from the front of the house to the side basement door. One afternoon he escaped my sight. I couldn’t find him immediately and started yelling his name, panicked.

I didn’t like it when my mom walked to the grocery store either, because once I started expecting her home in the late afternoon, she seemed to take so long. I’d fret at the window and wonder if something had happened to her, watching the day fade to be replaced by the inhospitable dark. Only once she came home laden with her bags could I relax and be cozy again.

It was when we moved to Pennsylvania after Christmas in 1986 that I really felt snow’s indifference. During the drive, I stared out the car window at miles of white. It was cold and uncaring and I didn’t know that I cared for much, either. We were headed for a place that was unfamiliar except for dim memories from when I was five–snow play, a birthday party with an outfit to match my doll’s, age-mates with a kind mom who fed us raisins, and my new baby brother born at the local hospital. Somehow, none of this happy mosaic made me look forward to our destination. I had injured my knee several weeks before. It was still swollen and sore, and I liked activity. There was nothing to see out the window but white.

It turned out that Pennsylvania wasn’t particularly welcoming to a handful of middle school kids arriving mid-year. In the community where we were to settle for a few months, we immediately joined in sledding on a fabulous hill that whooshed you down a long, steep embankment, shot you over a jump, and then had you gliding for yards along the driveway. I haven’t seen anything like it since. But my enjoyment was short-lived, since my dad was justly concerned that I would do permanent damage to my knee. I stayed indoors after that, by myself. I did a lot of reading that winter.

It was my first time at a public school. My siblings and I waited in the early morning dark, congregated with other kids on a green metal bridge. Everything was strange to me: the raucous bus ride with spittoon provided by the driver, the sheer size of building, the swarms of anonymous kids, and the obscene graffiti adorning bathroom walls and other surfaces. I read the graffiti and “poems,” an education in themselves, with a mixture of fascination and guilt. I listened in awe as the students on the bus yelled the lyrics to a favorite song: “I’m gonna FIGHT for my RIGHT to . . . ” To what? It sounded like “to body.” The word was held out for a long time, especially when the bus rounded steep, snowy corners, and it sounded like “body.” I kept an open mind that they were saying something else. Maybe “party?”

In the community we had invaded mid-year, our peers regarded us with a mix of cautious friendliness, indifference, and criticism. At the schools, we encountered open hostility. None of us four were exactly thriving, with my little brother harangued by the second-grade teacher for asking a question about math, my sister bullied by a red-haired girl in fifth grade, and me rendered speechless by put-downs from girls who didn’t know me and leering talk from boys. It was the winter I got glasses, big ones that were sure to satisfy the irritated school nurse, who had notified my parents a second time because I couldn’t make out the numbers on the giant clock in the auditorium.

One dark afternoon in early February, on a weekend near my thirteenth birthday, I lay in my bunk not particularly in the mood for anything. I just wanted to stay where I was. I heard a knock at the door. I thought about my birthday and hoped there wasn’t any kind of party afoot, since the last thing I wanted to do was mix with people and be polite. A kid greeted me at the door with a stack of cups. I was needed, he said, to walk the cups downstairs. Oh, great. I thought. A surprise party.  Sure enough, a small crowd was gathered to celebrate the thirteenth year of me and another kid I didn’t really know. I should have been pleased–my first surprise party. I did recognize my parents’ sweetness in having me open a small box with a pair of earrings, their tacit blessing on getting my ears pierced. Otherwise, I went through the motions, knowing my parents loved me but not able to appreciate their efforts.

With the heavy snow and the dark, the social rejection, and the unpleasant new stage where I lived in horror of serious diseases and watched for symptoms, I don’t remember thinking of spring. Yet it came unlooked for, gentle and green and generous. The expanses of blank whiteness melted away, replaced by solid ground to stand on, and grass. Our family drove out under the new foliage, in bright days along clear streams. The green metal bridge had been transformed with its new lush surroundings into a picture from a calendar. It was inviting now.

There came a day in early spring when I suddenly realized that sadness was not permanent. I was sitting in the sun when a soft, warm wind came up. It blew cobwebs from my brain, and rid me of dirt built up in dark corners. It occurred to me then that life offered things to hope for, and once more, I looked forward to what was next.