Chilly Read (continued)

The Igloo: Part II

           

Monday was another snow day. As soon as we could, we trekked down the street to get back to work. After we carted several buckets down to the igloo, we noted our slow progress.

            “You know,” I said, “it would go a lot faster if we had another person to help us.”

            At my sister’s suggestion, we invited Sam—our foreign-exchange neighbor—to join us. He said, “Sure!” and as soon as he got his coat and shoes and gloves on, he crossed the street to give us a hand. It was a good thing, too! With Sam’s help, we got another layer on in half the time it would’ve taken us by ourselves.

         When the walls were too high for me, Sam took over the job of placing the new blocks. We traded off doing different parts of the building process, but each of us had our specialty. I ran back and forth with the bucket, my brother shoveled snow into piles to fill it up, Sam planted it on the wall, and Rina packed snow in between to reinforce the structure.

            Our snow building grew taller and more impressive, and a few of our neighbors stopped by to admire it. One jolly man squeezed inside the narrow doorway to inspect it from the inside.

            The next day, we were back in school, and it was hard to sit in class all day after a full week of snow days. It was three days since we started our building project.

            The sun was already low behind the white haze of clouds by the time we started on our creation again. Soon it was so dark we could hardly see, and Mama wanted us to come home for supper. We scrambled to finish and put the roof on in the pitch black. Our feet and hands, like every day so far, were frozen, and we could all wring water out of our snow gloves. Finally finished for the day, we tramped home by the weak orange rays of the streetlights, satisfied with our success.