Judy Baer is the author of Love Finds You in Frost, Minnesota, from the Guideposts Books imprint Summerside Press.
Having grown up only 40 miles from the Canadian border in North Dakota, winter has always played an oversize role in my life. I’ve seen it come as early as October and stay as late as May. I remember the rainy days of spring, hot summers and the of harvest of fall, but it was winter that seemed epic to me.
There were days when I watched the world as though I were inside a snow globe, looking out. Deer would wander into the yard and birds would land on the feeder by the house, painting Christmas-like scenes. Writers are always advised to “write what we know,” and I know winter–that’s one of the reasons I so enjoyed writing Love Finds You in Frost, Minnesota.
Christmas in the traditional white clapboard church my grandfather helped build was always memorable. The Christmas program involved music and Bible verses the children recited in front of the congregation. I’m sure everyone loved the smallest kids, resplendent in Christmas finery, quoting Scripture, mistakes and all. At the first Christmas program I was big enough to take part in, I refused to go to the front of the church when my name was announced and the recitation I’d worked so hard to commit to memory went unspoken. Instead, I bowed my head and stared straight down.
When asked by my mother why I’d refused to go to speak, I had my answer ready: “I dropped my voice on the floor and lost it.”
To a little one, the tree at the front of the sanctuary was huge and, better yet, harbored treats for all of us. Bags of candy waited for each child beneath that tree. Particularly memorable was the colorful ribbon hard candy; it was bliss to have an entire bag of candy to myself.
More than one Christmas was marred by a blizzard, a frightening whiteout of snow that headlights can’t pierce, where roads seem to disappear and the community is paralyzed. Without a cell phone, a blizzard that raged for two or three days was a dangerous thing. One winter day school was dismissed early because a blizzard was coming through. Unfortunately the storm got to my house before I did. I remember the bus driver inching along our driveway in a sheet of blinding white with several children still on the bus.
Imagine my surprise when we got to my house and he told my parents that he couldn’t take the chance of going out again. That meant the kids who remained on the bus would spend the night. The novelty of the event is still etched in my memory–my mother frying hamburgers to feed the crew, running out of buns and serving the last burgers on white bread, the boys staging a raid on the room where the girls slept, a sick first-grader who coughed all night. As an adult, I shudder to think what might have happened had we not made it to my house that day.
Winters are more mild now than when I was a child and cell phones have taken much of the worry out of having trouble in a storm, but to this day I use snow as an excuse not to get dressed until noon (the freedom of a writer), cook (soup or apple crisp), watch movies and nap. That’s why writing about Frost was like coming home for me: a small town, winter, Christmas–what could be better?
