The Storm of ‘78 and an Alien Invasion

The Storm of ‘78 and an Alien Invasion

A story about imagination.

Part of a series of recollections from my youth

When I was thirteen years old there was a wonderful snowstorm. (At thirteen, blizzards are still considered good things.) It was one of those storms that everyone refers to by the year. “Back during the blizzard of ‘78" is what they would say. School was canceled for days. That almost never happened in our school district, so this was quite an event.

One day during the aftermath, I spent most of the morning trying to build an igloo. This involved mostly scooping out one of the drifts made by the snowplow. I guess what I actually built was a cave. The drifts and plow piles were so high you had to work at climbing them, and falling actually seemed dangerous.

Eventually I tired of digging and started sort of wandering around the ditch by the road. The snow had already crusted over so there were hard, flat areas and broken bits of snow kicked up by walking. I spent some time arranging the snow chunks into cities. Small, elaborate, alien cities. There was a stick nearby and this stick worked very well as a weapon of mass destruction, if you happened to be an Evil Alien Warlord. Which I was that day. I rained death and disaster down upon my snow crust alien landscape. The tip of my Death Stick could smash entire communities with a single sweeping motion. The insignificant life forms trying to escape had no chance as I showered them with ice and slush and dirt bombs from on high. I was unstoppable.

Eventually I stopped. My fingers were cold and my toes were numb and it was getting dark, so I went inside and watched Gilligan’s Island reruns and drank the hot cocoa my mom always made for me when I was cold.