On January 2, 1999, 22 inches of snow fell on Chicago. I was living over Tuman's Alcohol Abuse Center, which, you might have guessed, was a bar. Next door was a Ukranian funeral home. The man upstairs beat his wife.

My friend Mia walked the three miles from her apartment to my place wearing a Snocat snowsuit she'd found in a thrift store.

I have the picture of her. Her hood is up, framing her face, and behind her the old tin wall of my apartment – covered in layers and layers of paint – is shining in the flashbulb.

We sat up all night drinking tea, playing sleepover. My mother used to call it Giggle Whisper Whistle Hour.

Mia had grown up in Philadelphia and the stories about her childhood would make your hair stand on end. At three she'd been locked alone inside her apartment – the key around her neck in case of emergency. Now, looking out the window from my little kitchen she told me that she'd played a game with her sister when she was young. Snow would cover Philly and they would wait inside their rowhouse for the plow. Then, once the streets were cleared, they'd open up the second-story windows and jump into the plow piles from the ledge.

The snow was deep enough to catch them, flecked with ice and road salt and dirt. But looking up through it, the light was the surprise, an underwater-ness and glow that you'd surface out of with only the greatest effort. And the first breath would catch you off-guard.

**

I'd been living in that apartment for three and a half years by then, having moved in during the heat wave of 1995. Seven hundred people died while I painted the kitchen a yellow that turned out badly, and had to start again.

My boyfriend, Lawrence, and I had found the place on his thirtieth birthday. It was three bedrooms for $400 a month. It was fussy and Victorian when we shared it, full of dust and primary colors and the sound of Chicago Avenue with the #66 bus keeping time.

Three months after we moved in, Tuman's became a nighttime bar, not just a hangout for the early-shift guys from the local electrician's union. Holly played the jukebox loud when the old men left for home at 6:00. We left the stereo on in our living room to try to mask the noise. But from the alleyway we heard the bar's bathroom door opening and closing, letting Tom Waits and Iggy Pop yell up at us in bursts.

If we hadn't lived there, we could have been clear-eyed about it. It was a great bar, after all. It might have been a favorite, the glass and tin ceiling, the painting of the naked lady over the booze, the oak bar and carved barback. Hell, the name alone would have charmed us. We would have drunk $2 Guinness and listened to Falstaff at top volume and watched bike messengers flirt with art girls like everyone else.

As it was, we played prissy pioneers. We'd march into the bar at midnight in our pajamas and beg Holly to turn it down. We'd explain about our early-morning jobs, and Holly would look right at us as she turned the volume up. We never drank there.

Once Lawrence left, I gave up. I accepted the junkies in my hallway and the smoke smell in the rooms nearest the stairs. I woke up at 5:00 every morning to the noise of Carlos emptying the bottles into the dumpster. I started drinking there from time to time. I painted it all again, everything cool and bright, light as air and twice as lonely.

Some nights Heather and Patrick would call before they left for the bar. I'd meet them, sneaking downstairs, in through the back door without a coat. I'd sit next to them while Holly served me free Jack & Cokes out of kindness to the vanquished, and I bummed Heather's cigarettes. As the night wore on, Heather would explain again why I needed to get laid – one-night stands were the key to life, she said, and I'd never had one. We'd pick out men as we sat there, playing a game of it while Patrick argued politics on Heather's other side, screaming by the end of the night, quoting Fall lyrics, buying us shots.

Even a year after Lawrence left, celibate as hell, I couldn't bear to bring the men who flirted with me up through the back stairs. I held on to the perch above it and waited to stop missing my ex. My skin was a hard frost, not a touchable inch left. The way the ground is in, say, November. Where the first three inches of soil will bruise you if you hit the ground, and the grass has a crunch. Under that is something else, but you can hardly remember what it was for. Growth, or something, digging in, mud pies, pits.

**

The morning after the blizzard, Mia and I made eggs. Andy walked over from his apartment a few blocks away and we ate together in the snow-day feel of that morning. The two of them were flirting with flirting with each other and they'd created a little group that was serving as the camouflage for it all.

None of us had seen each other since the holiday. We'd flown home only a day or two before the blizzard. We found ourselves back in our apartments with Chicago announcing its usual start of hibernation.

As we cleaned up from breakfast we could see that under my windows Carlos was shoveling a thin, reedy path along the building, just wide enough for one foot in front of another. The piles he made seemed almost tall enough for Mia's leap of faith.

Behind me in the kitchen, Mia in her peripatetic way was starting a round of phone calls, forming a network across the city as if we were all connected by string and tin cans from tree house to tree house above the snow.

By the time she suited up in her Snocat and poor Andy, the Georgia boy experiencing his first Chicago winter, put on his hat with ear flaps, there was a plan to meet again at night and toast our resilience at getting out of our houses.

Mia had picked the Rainbo. It was an older bar north of my apartment. It hunkered low behind a tall six-flat on the corner of Division and Damen. When I'd moved to the city, Wicker Park was already cleaning up at a furious clip. Nelson Algren would hardly have recognized the place.

Weekend nights the Rainbo was now a sea of Lincoln Park Trixies and frat boys who'd heard of the place in some culture magazine or other. It was enduring a wave of discovery that made the regulars stay away. John Cusak had been spotted there.

But the bar was still staffed by musicians and indie label owners, and the weeknights were still a lot like the old days that I hadn't even been there for. The night after the blizzard was like that. No one was venturing out at all.

It had taken me twice the usual time to make the trek from my place. I walked up Hoyne to play my private route-planning game. I try to find a way that combines the best views, the most efficiency, and the most nostalgia. It's like the car game where you re-create the alphabet from license plates and highway signs. There's always a lyrical path to anywhere, you just have to find it.

Hoyne was the street of my first love affair with the city. My first Thanksgiving in Chicago Lawrence and I – when we were still drowning in newness and sex – walked Hoyne from Chicago Avenue to North Avenue, a route that took us past little brick cottages and two flats and farther north past the rotted old mansions of Wicker Park. The houses were Halloween-ish, book-ended with leafless sycamores and lilac bushes. Renovations were just around the corner that would take away all the seedy romance they had then. They'd waited for so long. We looked at them in their last moments of quiet.

I chose my blizzard route to remember and forget that November. I couldn't look up much as I walked - to keep my balance I watched my feet and played the memory of that walk with Lawrence in my mind.

What I missed was the feeling of it, not the weather or the easy walk or the sexy, untouched piles of brick. I missed how live everything felt to me then, how lit. Being in love like that, anything I touched felt warm – iron gates, branches, lamp post. But actually it was me that was warm, for the first time since I was diagnosed at 22 with the same kidney disease that was killing my Dad.

And even though it had only felt like that a little while before the work had set in and we'd been broke and living over a loud bar, it hadn't mattered. It gave me back my life for the first time, the love I had for him. And even though I have felt that since, the first time the thaw comes is the big surprise isn't it? And how do you get over that?

Maybe you don't, in fact. Maybe you instead resign yourself to cold settling over your body, you decide that that's the way you're supposed to feel.

I suppose I had decided that, resigned myself to the loud neighbors, my father's illness and my own, the chaos and the cold, to the sense of there never being heat again.

But the walk through the snow reminded me that there had been another way.

**

There is no photo-booth strip from that night. I don't remember much from the bar. The quiet light of the place, flowers sitting in a vase by the ladies' room door.

What I remember is leaving. I found my things, put them on, and left the bar with Doug. He was an old friend of Andy's, someone I'd met at some party or other. As we stood facing each other on the sidewalk he looked at me once, quizzically, and asked me if I'd like tea.

I said yes before I knew what it meant. It was the chance to be invited in somewhere, to come into an open space instead of opening mine. The moment I'd said it, Doug turned on his heel and walked east to his place, and I followed with an edge of panic – grasping the offer in my dense way, finally.

I'd never been someone who understood the exchange of invitations that lead to sex in the adult world. Sex for me was stuck in some strange, child-of-hippies place. It flowed naturally from skinny dipping or camping. It was not offered up on street corners or in bars, and if it was, it certainly wasn't offered up to me.

As I walked behind Doug, I did a little math in my head. I found him attractive. He was a photographer, and I'd seen his work. He was well-read, with good taste in music, design, and friends, but I found it nearly impossible to maintain a conversation with him that interested me. There was a vagueness to his thinking that threw off my chirpy earnestness every time. I was sure I'd never want much from him.

And yet I was following him home, I had an invitation that implied some interest on his part, something I couldn't really fathom.

**

We took off our coats in the living room and I sat in his kitchen while he worked at the stove. Along the top of his white cabinets he'd arranged a collection of green vases and bowls. I kept looking at them, thinking about the time he'd taken to lay them out, the visual punch of them.

We talked over cups of tea. From time to time I'd get up from the kitchen table and pace the room with the warm cup in my hands. I felt suddenly nervous in his space, the green bowls looking down at me. I looked around and wanted no part of it, really, but it occurred to me that I wanted to be kissed.

It was just the little crack in the ice, the reedy path home, the first try. And since it seemed so suddenly necessary I began to worry that it wouldn't come. Do men really make tea in their handsome kitchens on romantic snowy nights for girls they mean to seduce? Or do they just seduce them with no questions or pauses or beverages at all?

And then my tea was gone – first one cup and then a refill and no third was offered.

I walked back into the living room with its brown walls and comfortable chairs and he followed me. I asked a few awkward questions about his paintings, which he answered. We both looked at my coat on the couch, and I put it on. I walked to the door and he followed.

And then he reached down and pulled up my chin and kissed me.

I understood what Mia was describing when she told me about leaping into snow. As if it were my own sense memory, the kiss brought it back to me. The snow was dirty. It scraped your face with bits of rock. The fight up out of the drift was like digging out of a grave. And though it was inelegant and rough, it was the prize of your own freedom that made it sing.

I took the kiss and, warmed, I headed out the door.

**

I walked back west, past the lights and cars on Damen. I kept up until I reached Hoyne again. A few blocks south I came to Lawrence's old block. There was the nondescript brick three-flat where he'd shared an apartment, the place he'd lived in when we met. The window to his old bedroom looked out on the street. I walked to it now and stood for a moment with my back to the building. I kept looking at the view I'd always seen from his bedroom window, thinking of our night walk through Wicker Park.

The cottage across the street had been framed perfectly in his window then, the leaves that usually blocked it knocked down by cold rain. And now the cottage sat framed by the snow lining its roof. Its chimney was puffing out wood smoke, the tree in front of me waiting for spring.

A thaw would come, it seemed to me. The city, the cottage, the tree, the street, and I would all remember life again. The reach for light and air would leave us finally blinking on the sidewalk in the sun.




© Eiren Caffall 2006.