Schenectady by Jack Foley

​The backyard was a thick blanket of snow, while I sat at the kitchen table sipping a mug of hot cocoa with a wisp of puffy whipped cream swirling well above the mug’s edge, like a cloud stretching toward space without limits. I slurped the hot refreshment down in two minutes flat, so I could go romping around in the untouched white snow. My family was staying in our cousins’ old house in Schenectady, New York. The indoor temperature was struggling to surpass 55º Fahrenheit, so everyone fashioned flannel pajamas; nobody ever wandered far from a hot drink.

​“Brianna! Meghan!” I called out to my sisters. “Adam! Alex!” I summoned my cousins as well. “I got an idea!”
​Brianna trudged in first, apparently displeased to be awake at this time of morning. She wore red and white flannel pajamas and her bed head flopped and bounced behind her. “Why did you have to scream it?” she said drowsily.
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“I didn’t have to,” I retorted and smirked at her above my mug.

​Meghan, Adam, and Alex walked into the room as Brianna asked, “What’s your brilliant plan?”

​I explained to them my plan of bounding up and down on the trampoline in their backyard. On it lay pounds of fluffy snow, so when we would bounce on it, snow would go flying. All of us agreed to participate in this, so we found our snow pants and our parkas and pulled them on over our pajamas. We added earmuffs, laced up our boots, and we were off.
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Meghan and I took off for the trampoline, while the other three lagged behind, complaining about the cold. Eventually, we had all reached the trampoline. With one last look back at our boot prints, I turned and sparked the bouncing. As I had planned, snow flew up toward the sky and glittered in the mid-morning sun. We giggled hysterically, unable to cease.

​It was a beautiful moment, just my cousins and I sharing a good, long laugh at a house in Schenectady that is now somebody else’s, in a backyard where all the snow has melted, on a trampoline that is hardly used these days.