FAR Future, Episode 80: White Valentine’s

Yeah, that was an April Fool’s joke on Wednesday. Ah well, I’ll have to rewrite this into a more traditional novel format before trying to pitch it anyway. Today’s post is sort of appropriate because there’s actually snow in tomorrow morning’s forecast…

Tuesday, February 14, 2036
White Valentine’s

Bobby and Martina are pretty good about not waking everyone up… they tend to be up before everyone, every morning, unless one of the adults is having trouble sleeping. But they couldn’t help themselves this morning.

I know Bobby slips downstairs a little after 5:30 in the morning, and Martina usually comes from across the driveway shortly after that. They usually don’t wake me up, but sometimes I’ll hear them. Maria wakes up for a bathroom run about 5, and if she doesn’t get right back to sleep after that she’ll hear them too. They do their homework and feed the firebox while they wait for the adults to start breakfast. This morning was a little different, since it started with 10 cm of snow on the ground… I hadn’t seen this much snow here in ages.

So when Martina stepped outside, she was the first to see it. She got all excited, and ran in to tell Bobby, and they both ran outside to play in it. They started piling it up on the slab, then got to flinging it at each other and then chasing each other around the manor, laughing and yelling. Needless to say, this woke up everyone — except Pat, who is like his mom in his antipathy toward mornings. But Ray came out and started squealing when he saw the snow, and got Pat up anyway.

Rene took one look at the fluffy white stuff and decided he’d stay inside and help his mom cook breakfast (Guillermo and Maria weren’t having any of it either). Serena, being a Wisconsin girl from way back, laughed at them and went out to play with the kids. Pat just stood gawking at the snow until Daughter Dearest and Ray started lobbing snowballs at him, then he finally got the idea. I joined the Smiths and Joneses, watching the fun and chatting. Ray and Pat challenged Bobby and Martina to a snowman contest, which gave Daughter Dearest the chance to call the neighbors to tell them that school was cancelled for the day. She gets to make the call for our school, after all.

The snowmen were interesting… none of the kids, including Pat, have ever seen enough snow to build a snowman before, and they didn’t know to pack a snowball and start rolling. I was going to give them some pointers, but Serena stopped me. “Let them do it their way,” she said. “See what they come up with.” That turned out to be… interesting. Pat (I’m sure it was Pat) got the idea to make a Snow Amazon: they piled and packed their snow, cut vertical grooves into it to look like dress pleats, then Pat boosted Ray up on his shoulders and they kept on piling. Eight feet high they went, and Pat lovingly sculpted a huge pair of boobs into it, at face level of course, while Ray etched a happy face up above.

As they were finishing up, Daughter Dearest joined me, looked at their work, and rolled her eyes. “Like grandfather, like grandson,” she said.

“You have to look up to her, though,” I said. “Or not… I could have quite a meaningful conversation with that chest!”

Tch. “Aren’t you getting a bit old for that sort of thing?”

I took a breath. “Still breathing.” Felt my chest. “Still have a pulse. Nope, not too old yet.” Sean and Mary laughed.

DD rolled her eyes again. “Yeah, but she doesn’t have a pulse. Isn’t that your primary criterion for being attracted to someone?” The Joneses joined in the laughter this time. “You. Are. Busted!”

“Ouch. You got me there… She’s probably a cold one, anyway.”

Meanwhile, Martina thought to grab a stepladder; she and Bobby were reaching for the stars. Or at least the eaves of the house. Bobby laughed at Pat’s breastworks, but they had a different idea… they were going to build a tower like the rook in our chess set. It took them a while, and they were having to scrounge for snow at the end, but I got a picture of them kneeling in the top of their tower looking down (and of course I got a pic of the Snow Amazon too).

Breakfast de las Cardenas provided a sort of halftime for the contest. Breakfast was good and hot, including plenty of hot tea and ersatz cocoa, and included a phone call from Christina.

“I heard it snowed up there,” she said on the speaker. “We got a little here in Atlanta too.”

“There’s a lot of it,” Rene told her. “Everyone else was outside playing in it while we fixed breakfast.”

“You didn’t go out in it?”

“Somebody needed to help Mama with breakfast!”

She laughed, and all of us did too. “You got pictures, right?” Kim asked.

“Of course. We’ll mail them tonight.”

“Oh yeah. They’ve de-restricted bandwidth for local access down here,” he said. “I forgot it’s not universal.”

“Yeah, rub it in,” I laughed. “They cache some of the primary news sites here, so we can get those pretty quick, but it’s like a newspaper… they don’t update through the day.”

Of course, by lunchtime the temps had climbed above freezing and the snow (especially where the kids had been scooping) was starting to melt. Pat and I were disappointed when the boobs fell off the Amazon, just as she was starting to warm up a little.

“Hey,” Daughter Dearest said, looking at the large but slumping tower. “Are you going to have any trouble getting the Heehaw around that?”

“No, it’s not in the way,” I said. “Besides, I could just back into it and knock it over. But nobody’s going anywhere anyway.”

Indeed… all of Sector 706, from reports on line and on the air, was pretty much shut down. Some of the mountain areas got 20 cm, although in most places it was 6 cm or less. It was quite the event… and Atlanta TV had people sending in photos and video. I sent a low-res pic of the kids on top of their tower, and they ran that one on the evening news (much to the delight of all). It has been a rather chilly winter; we’ve been going through firewood pretty steadily, although (like always) we’ve had a bunch of false springs that just make us wish for the real thing. Nobody knows if next winter will be like this one… again, ask 10 different climatologists what things will be like long term and get 20 different answers.

continued…