The Snow Day

Molly knew before she opened her eyes.

It was the light. It was the wrong colour, too white and too early, coming round the edges of the curtains as if it had been waiting there all night. And it was the quiet. The road outside her window usually made a noise in the morning, cars and the bin lorry and Mr Patel’s van. This morning there was nothing. Nothing at all.

She got up and looked.

Snow.

It was on everything. On the wall and the gate and the car, which was just a white lump now with a wing mirror sticking out. On the roofs across the road, thick and smooth and untouched. On the branches of the tree by the lamp post, on every branch, even the thin ones, balanced there as if someone had put it on very carefully with a spoon.

And it was still coming down.

“No school,” said Mum, from the doorway. She was in her dressing gown and she was smiling. “They’ve rung. Nobody can get in.”

Molly put on everything. Her coat over her jumper over her other jumper, and her hat, and her gloves, and her scarf wound round twice. By the time she was done she could hardly bend, and she went down the stairs sideways, one step at a time, like a very small astronaut.

The back door stuck. Mum had to push it. And then it opened, and the garden was there, and it was not the garden.

Nobody had walked on it. That was the thing. It was flat and white from the step to the fence, and it was perfect, and Molly stood on the step and did not want to be the one to spoil it.

Then she thought, someone has to, and stepped down.

Her boot went in up to the ankle. The snow squeaked. She took another step, and another, and looked behind her, and there were her footprints, three of them, dark and deep and hers, going out into the white.

She was halfway to the fence when she saw the robin.

It was on the top of the fence, on the snow, and it was very small and very round and very red at the front, redder than anything else in the whole garden. It was looking at her with one eye. Then it hopped, and looked at her with the other.

“Hello,” said Molly.

The robin did not go. Robins often don’t. It puffed itself up a bit more, so it was nearly a ball, and looked at the snow, and looked at her, and Molly understood.

“You can’t find anything to eat,” she said. “It’s all covered up.”

She went back inside, sideways, and came out with a handful of crumbs from the bottom of the bread bin and a bit of cheese, which Mum said robins liked. She brushed the snow off the bird table, which took three goes because her gloves were too big, put the crumbs and the cheese there, and stepped back.

The robin looked at her.

She stepped back some more, until she was almost at the door.

The robin dropped off the fence, and landed on the bird table, and ate.

Molly stood very still in the snow, with the flakes coming down on her hat and her shoulders and her eyelashes, and watched a robin have its breakfast, and thought it was the best thing she had ever seen.

The rest of the day had a snowman in it, a lopsided one, with a carrot and Dad’s old scarf. It had snow angels, and hot chocolate, and wet gloves on the radiator.

But it was the robin she thought about, at the end of it, in bed, with the curtains open a little so she could see the snow still falling under the street lamp, slow and thick and quiet.

It would be out there somewhere. In the hedge, probably. Puffed up like a ball. Full of cheese.

Molly closed her eyes.

Outside, the snow came down on the garden, and filled her footprints, one by one, until they were gone, and the garden was perfect again, and waiting for tomorrow.