We were thrilled at the first flakes of snow on Wednesday -- the first snow of the season. The lingering effect of three years spent living in Senegal with the sun set to "Broil" makes me almost giddy about winter weather. I'm a sucker for cold, rain, and fog... any atmospheric effects that were withheld from me when I lived amidst ten inches annual rainfall. Susan, on the other hand, once walked into an outdoor-clothing store and told them that she didn't really care how much it cost but she never wanted to be cold again. They sold her a multi-layer parka that looks like a slightly more stylish version of a NASA space suit. I have no doubt that many relationships have broken up over less profound differences in perception, but we've managed our contrariety in thermal orientation pretty well.

Unfortunately, this snow boded ill for our Christmas plans. I had decided to drive down to Covesville on the 24th, to attend a party of neighbors who have been getting together on Christmas Eve since before I was born. It's traditional for the same crowd to show up year after year, so everyone can reconnect, observe the growth of young people and the growth (or decline) of older ones, and then go out caroling. Not only do the same people show up every year, but each participant also brings the exact same food, year after year, and we always go Christmas caroling at the same houses afterwards. Virtually nothing ever changes except for the occasional appearance of a new husband, wife, or child, and even they frequently develop the willpower to cease coming after a happy interlude. It's a charmingly uncreative and reassuringly enduring constant in my life.

The only years I've ever missed the Christmas Eve party were when I was living in Senegal. But when I called my mom's house on the morning of the 24th, my sister told me not to bother coming -- the gravel mountain road to the house was "an ice rink." I lived here long enough to know that long after the highways were plowed and pristine, the winding road up to our house would be a single sheet of partially melted and refrozen ice. It would be passable only to people with a four-wheel drive truck and a death wish, which would get many of my neighbors home for Christmas, but not necessarily me. Having sold my car, I had borrowed Susan's mother's boyfriend's car for the trip, and had little desire to spend my last few moments of life being smeared around the interior of a splintering 1988 Nissan Sentra station wagon.

We instead spent a cozy evening eating Matzo ball soup and watching the ultimate low-impact fluffy date movie, Sliding Doors. It was one of the first evenings in the last few weeks that I hadn't sat down at the computer to do some writing, whether to crank out a Tale of Sin and Virtue or something more exalted. Late in the evening, before we turned in, I experienced a moment of anxiety at breaking my productive roll, but domestic bliss was a far more motivating force.

In a hasty phone consultation with my family the following morning, I hatched a new plan: we would postpone Christmas for a day. We would come down on the 25th, which everyone agreed would now be Christmas Eve, and we'd open presents and do a big dinner the following day. So on the 25th, we packed Susan's mother Jane and the entire office infrastructure of the business into the Sentra and set off for my childhood home. The office, as it turns out, occupies more room in the back of a small car than I thought it would, and conditions for whomever was stuck in the back seat at any given moment were of steerage quality. The skies were clear and scalding bright blue, and the last of the snow was being wiped from the landscape as we drove. The highways were wonderfully, post-armageddonally empty.

As we approached Charlottesville, we saw much more unmelted snow and ice clinging to the trees bordering the road. Several miles past the town, when we turned up the road to my old house, my most ominous expectations were completely satisfied. The road was unplowed, changing from sloppy slush to bright ice as we gained elevation, with only a few tracks indicating that other deranged people with superior automotive power had managed to negotiate it successfully. But I was determined not to have made the whole trip, on Christmas Day, in vain. Susan was in the back seat curled into crash-ready position, and I was considering how one false move on my part could essentially erase her family line off the earth. The car slid, grabbed, slid, and scrabbled its way up the mountain, propelled by an overwhelming impetus I had scarcely known I was carrying within me. I was going to get to that house and that family, damn it, and no force of nature was going to get in my way.

Susan has been out to this house before; she even made the trip in a heavy snowstorm last year. But I felt a little sheepish that this would be Jane's first taste of a place that has had so much influence over who I am. When I was growing up, getting stuck up on the mountain was exciting because it meant missing school, not because it was particularly unusual. Even when most of the world had gone back to the regular post-snow business of living, our higher elevations remained snowbound. There were days when I cross-country skied down the road to my school bus driver's house, where I stowed my skis and continued on to school. I had no idea how unusual that was until I went to college and found that most of my friends were from the sort of burbs or lovely small towns where Susan grew up.

After we had survived the trip and were warming up inside the house with my family, I was a little apologetic for the inconvenience (and outright fear) that Susan and Jane had faced in getting there. It wasn't really necessary, but I often assume that other people won't understand or appreciate the elaborate costs and rewards of a life of such isolation. To us, getting snowed in up here was always an exciting event -- a pleasurable mix of forced relaxation and the thrilling desperation of being Alone. The fact that I grew up where such isolation is possible has always seemed like a wonder to me. Bringing people I whom like here is like letting them read for themselves a book I had always just summarized for them. It's terrifying -- and if I'm lucky, I get stranded here in their company for a precious while.