About when I wasn’t sure whether we were done or not with our preparations, winter flitted into the streets, and real, honest snow began to fall. During the winter, the entire neighborhood is locked in by the snow, so we’re typically confined in our houses except on unusually clear days.
For me, if I have books to read, I can let myself be shut away forever, so whiling away the long winter months would be no trouble at all. I, however, don’t have a single book. Will I be able to manage this long kind of isolation without them?
As the snow kept falling, it frequently turned into a full-blown snowstorm, forcing us to keep the doors and shutters tightly closed, with thick clothes stuffed into the crevices to try to shield us from the drafts just a little more.
“…Uuuugh, it’s dark,” I whine.
“We’re in a snowstorm,” says Tory, ”there’s nothing we can do about that.”
The only sources of light in this locked-down apartment are a handful of candles and our stove. It may be daytime, but with our windows sealed so tightly not a single ray of sunlight can get in. This is my first time being in such a gloomy room without a single electric light to brighten it. Even when a hurricane knocked out my power, I had flashlights and the light on my cell phone for illumination, and they got my power restored very quickly. Trapped inside a gloomy room such as this, will I have no choice but to become gloomy myself?
“Hey, Mommy, is everyone’s house dark like this?” I ask.
“Hmm,” she says, “If someone has a little money, they can have quite a few lamps lighting up their homes. We only have one, though.”
“Oh? Let’s light ours, then!”
My mother sighs and shakes her head at me as I try to insist that lighting equipment is meant to be used. “We want to be careful with our oil, so we should avoid using it whenever we can. If it stays this cold and if the winter drags on, we’ll run out of candles eventually, and that would be a big problem, you know?”
There’s no counterargument to the way she talks about frugality. Come to think of it, my own mother in Japan was always talking about scrimping and saving and coming up with elaborate ways to spend as little as possible. To save electricity, she’d unplug the TV when it wasn’t in use, although she’d then fall asleep with it on all the time. She’d brush her teeth the barest minimum of water to save on the water bill, yet she’d leave the faucet running constantly while washing the dishes… I wonder what she would do to lighten up this room, if she were in this situation.
“Maine, what are you doing?” asks my mother.
“I wonder if this will make the room just a little bit brighter…”
I’ve grabbed one of my father’s old metal gauntlets from his old wartime days, polished them up a bit, and placed it next to a candle, trying to use its metal surface like a mirror to maybe make it seem a little brighter.
“Maine, stop that,” says my father.
“I can’t see what I’m doing,” says Tory.
Two people rejected me at the same time! Unfortunately, these gauntlets aren’t straight pieces of metal, and you can’t really say that they’re anywhere close to being shiny. They caught the flickering candlelight with a strange, irregular reflection, glimmering harshly in our eyes and making it even more difficult to see what we were doing.
“Ahh, it didn’t work… I wonder if there’s anything else I can use as a ”mirror”…”
“Please don’t do unnecessary things,” says my mother.
