45. Remembering Tía Rosa

Tía Rosa — Aunt Rose in English — and her husband Uncle Dave were our neighbors when my young family lived in upstate New York many years ago. They were not relatives at all, but we came to think of them as such.

They were our only neighbors, retired and living for many years in a comfortable little trailer a few hundred yards down from the house I was renting. It was a long stretch of country road that meandered into the little village of Port Leyden. In the opposite direction was the wild country of the Adirondack mountains.

I had taken a job teaching at Adirondack High School in Booneville, New York.

We had been living in a cottage in Saylorsburg, PA, a sylvan setting along a crystalline creek. With my doctoral dissertation pending at Penn State, we were not ready to return to Puerto Rico, so I researched teaching positions. The only two that appealed to me were in Alaska and upstate New York. New York seemed like the more temperate choice: I took the job at the Adirondack High School.

We packed all our belongings into a rented truck, attached our car behind and took off to Booneville, a place we had never heard of. We stayed the first night in a small hotel there and the owner recommended we search for rentals in Port Leyden, the next village. A couple we met at a lunchroom there told us about a house that was available a mile or so out of town. We contacted the owners, signed a lease and the next day we moved in.

I don’t remember how we first met Rose and Dave, but it must have been through the kids. A friendship grew quickly, especially when they offered their services as babysitters. They had solid reputations in the village (I checked), missed their own grandchildren and liked earning a little extra money. They endeared themselves to us when they refused to allow us to disturb the children after they were asleep or take them out into the cold night air. And they didn’t charge us for the extra hours.

Things were going splendidly. I liked the job, the school was new, the administration competent, the faculty friendly and the students were willing to learn. It was a situation not often repeated in my teaching career.

Then it started to snow. And snow. And snow. Huge mountains of snow would fall in a single night. The bungalow was buried up to the top of its picture window — we could only get in and out through a door in the “breezeway,” the space between the garage and the house.

The town had a fleet of tractors and trucks and — amazingly enough — cleared every road as soon as the blizzards hit — that is to say, almost daily. The school was built long and low, which was the fashion at that time. The snow would cover it completely like a giant’s cotton blanket, hiding it from sight; dramatic swirls of snow would glitter in the sky.

Schools in the “snow belt,” for that is what the region is called, planned for these events. A generous calendar of “snow days” was built into the schedule for the school year. I especially appreciated it the night so much snow fell that the top of the antenna of my car was the only object visible in an ocean of white.

Everything about the snowbelt was perfect, except the snow. We tried to acclimate. We bought snowsuits, wrapped ourselves up better than Bigfoot and tried sledding. We tried cross county skiing and buzzed noisily around a few times on friends’ snowmobiles. Booneville was, and I suppose still is — the snowmobile capital of the Adirondacks, best know for it races. Most important, we made good friends and partied with great people.

One day, camped out inside the house with no desire to see a single new snowflake, I saw a commercial on TV. The actor was shoveling snow. He slipped and fell flat on his back. He looked up and saw an airplane and said, “I wish I was in Puerto Rico.”

That airline commercial did it. I wished I was in Puerto Rico. As much as we all enjoyed our Adirondack experience, we knew that we had run out of snow days. As soon as we could, we returned — permanently — to Puerto Rico. Some people are made for snow, some for sun.

In warm memory of Rose and Dave and the sensational snow of the Adirondacks, I created the painting above. It probably should have had more white!

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