She went to bed at one. The snow was still falling.
*
The telephone woke her at seven-fifteen. It was mounted on the wall at the foot of the stairs, a black rotary her mother had refused to replace with one of the new push-button models, and it had a ring like a fire bell, and Nora came down the steps in her robe at a dead run, thinking for one wild half-asleep second of three long blasts on a whistle.
It was Aunt Rosemary.
"Honey," said Aunt Rosemary, "have you seen it out there?"
Nora pulled back the curtain by the front door. She had not seen it out there. Sycamore Street had disappeared. In its place was a long white field, smooth and blue in the early light, with the tops of mailboxes poking out of it like the heads of curious animals. Her Volkswagen was not on the street because her Volkswagen was still sitting in the corner of the lot at Kessler's, but if it had been, she thought, it would have vanished entirely, a small green hump under the snow. Snow lay a foot deep on the porch rail. It was still coming down, finer now, and the sky was the color of a nickel.
"They closed the turnpike at Hazleton," Aunt Rosemary said. "And Route 6 is closed at Towanda — Pete heard it on the radio. They're saying twenty inches in the northern tier. Twenty inches, honey. In November." There was a pause, and the sound of a cigarette being lit. "Pete says he'll try if you want him to. He says he'll put the chains on."