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A Christmas Wedding — No Shotguns!

BethKanell
5 min readOct 23, 2019
R’s best friend P, wearing a beard of baby bib decorated with cotton balls. Christmas spirit, right?

How much split wood can you fit into the back of a Subaru wagon? One-third of a cord, if you leave the hatch door up.

[This is “Country” number 6!]

After all, we’d come to the mountains of Vermont with “gear” acquired in the (somewhat smaller) hills of New Jersey. And in 1978, in New Jersey, we’d traded our four-door sedan (R’s mother’s idea of what a growing family should have) for a Subaru. R’s best friend P, a knowledgeable mechanic, veteran, and reader of car design news, assured us the Subaru had the best four-wheel-drive vehicle for people like us. It turned out to also be useful hauling purchased wood in expectation of our first Vermont winter.

So when the first big snowfall arrived — more than two feet, and lovely — first we went out to play in it with Baby Boy. Then we took turns: Either R or I sat inside playing on the rug with the little guy, and the other person shoveled. And shoveled. Two long driveways, and it turned out that a two-foot snowfall bunches up in spots, with wind-packed three-foot-deep sections.

The proper New England wedding my parents had, some 33 years before ours.

By late afternoon, we had one driveway completely clear and the other about half done. Baby Boy settled for a nap. R…

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BethKanell
BethKanell

Written by BethKanell

Braiding loss, joy, love. Award-winning poet & author of YA adventures like This Ardent Flame; The Long Shadow, more. bethkanell.blogspot.com; member NBCC.

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