Last weekend I stopped by brother's house with two of my granddaughters. We were bringing a spring-or-fall jacket, a lightweight red quilted nylon outgrown, in nice condition and adorably cute, for one of his little girls.
As we drove up we could see them playing outside in the snow; when we walked across the porch to the back door we stepped over and around dolls and toys arranged in a pattern of domesticity understood only by children. (Why were Barbie dolls sitting on the laps of baby dolls, and why was Ken's head separated from his body? We didn't ask because this was the little ones' world, and we were only passing through.) There seemed to be plenty of snow left over from the storm the week before: The little sweeties were certainly enjoying themselves but they politely ran up to the porch to show that they were very excited about the company (us!).
Last month's snow day, Feb. 11, when school was canceled because of the storm, must have caused some jubilant cheers at many households when the announcement was made early in the morning. As I listened to the radio while getting ready for work I thought of my brother's wife, who is a Mother of Many with small children. My sister-in-law always seems to have something fun going on for the kids, but would this, a day off from school well into a lengthy winter, with everybody stuck indoors, be the one in which she succumbed to cabin fever?
I doubted it: If this had been a bet, my money would have been on my sister-in-law, The Intrepid One; however, I wondered what she would be up to.
At work, when I took a coffee break, I checked out her Facebook page.
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Before the days of the Internet and social networking, my mother and her friends grabbed the telephone early in the morning on snow days, dialing to ask one another if they had heard about it on the radio (in the background, children could be heard celebrating). They called each other periodically throughout the day, for adult conversation and company.
These days, we can contact each other very quickly, and often, via electronic technology. My sister-in-law was on Facebook posting to all of her friends right after breakfast. Today she and the kids were going to make frybread, she said; what were everybody's favorite toppings -- sugar, cinnamon, honey, butter, taco fixings?
Snow day, kids home from school, a blizzard outside, and frybread lessons (and eating). Sounded like great fun, and I made sure to check Facebook later on to see how things were going.
It looked great: She had posted photos of frybread dusted with powdered sugar, and in the background of the pictures, her house still looked intact. And I could see that friends had commented and "liked" her comments, which meant that, like my mother and her friends, they had supported one another by keeping in touch throughout the day.
Will the children remember the snow day that their mother taught them how to make frybread? Will they remember their mother "talking" with her friends through Facebook the way I remember my mom and her friends chatting on their wall phones with the extra-long cords that could reach all the way from the kitchen to the front room?
Many of their memories will, as ours have, become the stories that are told by grandparents, and "When I was a little girl" will begin tales of long ago that will fascinate their own grandchildren in the same way that my stories about days before the Internet and Facebook seem to astound mine.
And I hope that the Snow Day Frybread Lessons memory is one that they will tell in those years to come.
Monthly columnist Linda LeGarde Grover is a professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth, an award-winning writer and a member of the Bois Forte Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. E-mail her at lgrover@ d.umn.edu.
