We had fun the first winter we lived in Snowflake. There was so much to see, experience, and learn.
All my life I had prayed for snow, and now I finally lived somewhere my prayers might be answered with a yes. Each night before going to bed I watched the news, waiting for the five minute weather segment. It was pretty foolish, seeing that the closest news stations were down in the valley, but I got pretty good forecasting our weather based on what was happening a hundred and seventy-five miles to the west..
Every morning the first thing I would do was look out my window to see if there was snow. You would have thought I'd won the lottery the morning I looked outside and actually saw a dusting of white powder covering our lawn.
“Girl, it snowed!” I called down the hall. That was one morning I didn't have to pry them out of their beds.
My sister had warned us that the snow in Snowflake usually disappeared in a couple of hours.
“It doesn't exactly melt,” Linda had explained. “It's more like the ground just soaks it up.”
She was right, and that first snowfall really did vanish in a few hours, but not before Kami took her dog out to run around in it, still wearing pajamas and flip flops.
The next snowfall the girls tried building a snowman before school. Half an inch of snow, although beautiful, doesn't go very far when you start scooping it up.
Then came a morning when it was just raining, but the forecast had been for heavy snow in the mountains, and the sky was dark gray and threatening. I dropped the girls off at school, then just kept driving up the highway towards Show Low. I couldn't help myself. It wasn't long before the rain began turning to snow, and my heart began beating faster with the thrill of it. But you know what? Just because I loved looking at it didn't mean I knew how to drive in it. Soon the snow was sticking to the road, and a few miles after that it began piling up. That's as far as I got. I might love snow, but I wasn't brave enough to drive in it, yet.
The snow followed me almost all the way back to Snowflake, and later that morning the rain turned to snow even there. By the next morning we had two or three inches outside, and a Snow Day! It kept on snowing most of that day, too, and we ended up with nine inches of snow from that storm. It didn't just soak up and disappear, either, but lasted for over a week!
Meanwhile, Moe was learning how to string barbed wire fences and handle horses. We didn't have a well up at the place yet, so he rigged a 300 gallon water container on a small trailer which he could fill up with our hose at the rental house, then tow up and leave on our five acres west of town.
It was harder to figure out how to keep their grain and hay dry, though. A tarp worked, but we really needed a permanent shed, so Moe began drawing plans. For years he had enjoyed exploring ghost towns, so he designed a shed with a false front, a covered wooden porch, and hitching rail out front.
Moe found a lumber mill that sold a bunk of rough cut lumber for $200. I had no idea how much a bunk of lumber was, but one day he took the trailer and drove off to buy one. It turned out to be a lot of lumber, enough for him to build a really nice shed, and still have a bit left over.
The shed turned out so authentic looking that I just had to add one more touch. Moe had built a window on the side, right over the horses feed box, so he could feed them easily, but there were no windows in the front.
“I could paint some windows for you,” I suggested.
“OK,” Moe agreed, after I explained my idea, so when the weather was warm I took my paints up to the place with me and went to work.
On one side of the front door I painted a window with a silhouette of a sheriff, sitting at a table, on the other, a cowboy. What fun! Everyone who came up to our place commented on the “tack shack”, as Krissi christened it, and I was proud of the job Moe had done.
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