This is called “lake effect” snow, and it is extreme. About thirty miles in, the moisture starts to freeze and dumps snow on the poor exposed earth below. During the winter, which in Michigan lasts roughly six months, big fat clouds suck up moisture from Lake Michigan and then move to the east over the landmass of the state. Kalamazoo, Michigan, is our setting, a town located in the strangest place I’d ever experienced, the narrow strip of land running up the western side of the state about thirty miles inland from Lake Michigan. So many changes were afoot, why not a baby, too? How hard could it be? With a merry chuckle and a total lack of any sort of intelligent consideration for the future, we began “trying.” It didn’t take long.
I’d left Texas after twenty-nine years to be with Julie, and I was still adjusting to the upper Midwest. Julie was young, in her early twenties, and I was starting over after a childless first marriage had sucked the life and the better part of a decade out of me. We’d been married a few months, and we’d been discussing the future, one with fabulous new jobs in some exotic new location that was in no way Kalamazoo, and that future had kids in it, too.
I suppose it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all. Julie’s pregnancy wasn’t a huge surprise to us.
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