And I welcomed the chance. I longed for it. He was a beautiful, wonderful little boy. And I loved him and his father dearly. That was the biggest thing missing in my life.
I just prayed that my dreams would continue to come true.
***
“Wow, it’s awesome!” Toby yelled.
Mason put the finishing touches on the snowman and then we all stood back to look at it.
“Not bad, if I do say so myself,” I said. It had been several years since I’d made a snowman, and I wasn’t entirely sure how to go about it. However, Mason put it together like some kind of a seasoned pro. His response to that observation was typical Mason. “It’s like riding a bike.”
I did not see how the two were related, but if that was his answer then that was just fine with me. The snowman was about four feet high. It had button eyes, a carrot for a nose, and a wide smile that Toby had decided would be better with monster teeth. So our snowman now looked rather evil. I wondered if it might be scary enough to frighten away the Scarluccis if they somehow found us up here.
It was a nice thought. Farmers used scarecrows didn’t they? Why not a scary snowman?
“Ok, we have to take a photo,” I said.
Mason pulled out his camera which had a timer and set it on a ledge close by. He set it and walked over to be with the two of us and our new creation. The picture was perfect.
Afterwards we went inside and got some lunch. Mason had a bona fide wood pizza oven built into the cabin and he made the most delicious pizza I may have ever put into my mouth. The wood oven somehow gave the pizza that extra bit of flavor. It was by far the tastiest pizza I’d ever known.
After lunch we were all decently full of pizza, and I wished someone had suggested it was time for a nice, long nap, but I didn’t want to become that lazy. I was already starting to feel pampered by this new lifestyle. It was fun and all, but it was super important to me that I maintained my core self.
So, I suggested we play some board games until our food settled. And then it would be time to ski.
We started off with a few hilarious games of Sorry! It was here that I discovered that Mason was in fact a cheater. He kept trying to refute the rules of the board game and misinterpreting the proper course of action.
“You have to be doing something weird with the dice,” Mason said. “That is the only way you are lucky enough to keep getting those rolls.”
“No, I’m not,” I said. “It’s just the luck of it.”
I sipped my hot chocolate and then gave Toby a high five. We were both beating Mason in the third game we’d played. It was the funniest thing to see how angry he could get from a silly board game. But it was great fun.
It reminded me so much of our winters when I was a kid with my family. We would all get together and drink hot chocolate and play board games and card games by the hours. There was music in the background and we really got to enjoy all of that family time, which we didn’t quite have the same the rest of the year. I’d always wondered why it had to be done at such and such a time. Why couldn’t the whole family get together more often and share their love with one another?
I knew it had something to do with a feud that my dad and his brother had with each other. I never did find out what it was exactly about, but I do remember when my uncle died of a heart attack. My father was destroyed. It took death to put it in perspective how much of a waste of time their silly feud was. They missed all those years and all that time with each other. Christmas was one of the few times of the year that they would actually be civil to each other, and they did that mostly for their families. The rest of the year they gave each other the cold shoulder.
I always swore to myself that no matter what, if I ever ended up with a feud like that in my family, that we would squash it immediately no matter what it took. Life was just too short to play those types of games.
“Daddy loses again!” Toby yelled as I was crowned the winner of game three.
“So, do you, buddy,” Mason reminded him.
“Yeah, but not as bad as you. I’m number two!”
Mason laughed. Hearing Toby say that he was “number two” was decidedly hilarious. Of course Toby did not know why we were laughing exactly, but one day he would get the joke. Until then, there was nothing wrong with having a little fun that he wasn’t fully clued into.