This Time Last Year - Maggie Wooll

The snow came early to the high country. The aspen leaves black with frost almost before they turned, then coated in the heavy stuff that only hits in freak storms, the early fall, the late spring. It made for a good deer season, even if the Texans bitched about freezing their asses off; by late October the deer had all come down to 8000, 7000 feet where the snow wasn’t too crusty and the grass not yet brittle. That snow had lasted all season, the rare promise kept of a deep and brutal Colorado winter, storm upon storm through December, January, February with a hellish cold that dashed any hopes of reprieve in between, blue sky or no.

There hadn’t been a winter like that since the early 90s, back before all the retirees moved in and bragged about the climate and the 10-month golf season and built custom 3000-foot homes on the sage-covered lower slopes. That winter Willow Boy and his mom had been living up north in a fifth-wheel trailer with a space heater and an extension cord and a dingo/collie mutt named Corky that seemed to have ducked either breed’s intelligence but retained the desire to meddle. Every night Willow Boy lay awake wondering if he’d freeze to death or be consumed by fire before morning. His mom laughed at his 10-year old fears, told him he worried too much, as if every year the Independent didn’t have a story about some trailer or another going up in flames and the whole family with it.

The snow piled up well above the wheels, the 50 yards to the road as good as a mile, the path he scraped icy and treacherous. What he remembered most about that winter was how the light was always blue, from twilight to dawn, the blue coming from somewhere deep under the surface.