Yellow is Mom’s favorite color.

When we were little, she once stayed up all night painting an entire wall of our living room yellow.

Just one wall.

When Mark and I awoke the next morning, Mom was sitting lotus style in her paint-splattered coveralls on the living room floor. Her back to us, she stared at the wall. She had gathered Mark into the cocoon of her lap and wrapped an arm around my legs. Pulling me close to her side, she kept her eyes on the wall even while she buried a kiss in Mark’s dark curls.

It was after the streetlamps had popped to life, after my newly broken-in sled was stowed against the house behind Mom’s burlap-wrapped rose bushes. After the no school day, the meet me and Joe and Frank on Baker’s Hill day. After snowball fights and forts. Long after my nose grew too cold to sting any longer, my feet and hands had stopped tingling and felt heavy with the warmth that followed the wet cold.

It was when I stood on the shadowed porch outside our front door, snow clinging to my boots, my breath swirling in veils of white around my face. When my mittened hand slipped against the knob, I clenched the soaking wool between my teeth and freed my stiff pink fingers from the sodden glove. It was in that moment that I looked through the frosted glass of the front window and saw them dancing.