The Great Storm of  ’88
    
A cool breeze ruffled my hair as I stepped through the cabin door after my morning chores. “Winter’s comin’,” Mama declared, flipping the last pancake onto her favorite platter before drenching them all in maple syrup. I groaned. All of us Coopers hated winter. We couldn’t sleep at night, and when we woke up, we were too cold to stay in bed and too cold to get up. Sometimes little James would play out in the snow, or Papa would go to town for supplies, but other than that we just stayed inside and waited for spring.
    
That winter of 1888 started like all the ones before, not too cold, but certainly not warm either. By early March, we decided that the worst was over, but if we’d known what was yet to come, we never could’ve slept in peace.
    
A week later I awoke, never knowing that I would experience a tragedy that would go down in history books for years to come. The seemingly ordinary day slid by like butter on a hot pancake until around three o’clock when the wind started blowin’.
    
Before I knew it, there was three feet of snow on the ground, trees were falling, and my family was huddled in the back of our little cabin, clutchin’ each other like our lives depended on it, and who knows, maybe they did. Right then, Papa decided that we would go outside to climb down into our little storm shelter, but the moment after everyone was hustled out to the door, our little cabin, the place I’d lived all my thirteen years, collapsed
    
I don’t quite remember what happened next, but somehow we got ourselves down into that little underground shelter, little James wailin’ all the way.
    
Our papa got frostbite and lost two toes, but everybody turned out safe in the end.
    
To this very day, tellin’ this story from the comforts of my own home, I’ll never forget those who lost their lives, were injured, or are still telling the story of that sad, sad March of ’88.