Charles’s first campaign speech for the new year’s thrust was slated for January eleventh. Sometime during the early morning hours of January tenth, snow began to fall. “If I hadn’t seen it myself I would have never believed it,” he said, looking out the window on the morning of the tenth. The ground was already covered with a white carpet of snow; the fences looked as though they’d been sprinkled with sugar, and children were outside playing, throwing snowballs and building their snowmen. “If this keeps up, I guess I’ll have to cancel the rally tomorrow night.” The snow was a beautiful sight to behold, more beautiful in Galveston—with the houses close together and the snow along the fences forming a sparkling chain, linking all of us together as a unit—than in Grady, where snow comes a sight more often, and only adds to the bleakness of the sparsely populated landscape out from town. “Look, there’s Janet,” I said. She’d come out on the lawn with Serena, both of them bundled up from head to toe, enjoying the experience of snow together.
