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“It really is a Tiny Town,” I said. I stared through the spotty glass at each little house and squinted to see if there might be any tiny people. Piles of snow, dirty from the splash back, lay against the closed chain link which seemed all the grayer for the snow on the ground. I pushed my face up against the cold glass of the window, the hot air of the defrost blowing strands of my brown hair along my ear and making the fog of my breath disappear off the glass.

Ponderosa pines, blue-green and brown, lined the rutted two-lane road that wound up and around the lonely mountain cabins scattered here and there in little meadow openings. They were surrounded by grasses sticking up like straw through the crusted white snow. One two-story cabin, with a sloping drive that ended at the lower level garage door, stood in an opening among the Ponderosa. The fall sky was powder blue and the sun sparkled off a golden orange old tractor parked outside the four-panel white garage door. Two windows, like dark eyes, looked out just above the tractor.