Saving Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

tellin’ her how we might not have to go to school for a whole week. Then Shiloh gets into the act, skidding around the linoleum, his toenails clickin’ and scratchin’.
    â€œWell, I sure wish I’d got extra milk,” says Ma. “I can always make bread, and I’ve got beans and salt pork enough for an army, but there’s not much substitute for milk.”
    â€œWe can always put snow on our cereal!” says Dara Lynn, laughing.
    Ma decides to get in the spirit of things, too, so she gets out her valentine cookie cutter, and she and the girls make cookies while I carry in wood for the little potbellied stove in the living room. Our house has a furnace, but it don’t work if the electricity goes out, so a couple years back Dad put in the potbellied stove.
    â€œNext best thing to a fireplace,” Ma says.
    I know if I don’t bring in the wood now and stack some more on the porch, I’m not going to be able to find the woodpile in another couple hours.
    Shiloh goes out with me, and tries to tunnel through the snow with his nose. I stack wood on the porch first, then stamp the snow off my boots and make another couple trips from the porch to the stove inside. By this time Shiloh’s had his fill of snow and comes when I call. He plops down close to that potbellied stove, giving out big contented sighs, his eyes closin’. He wore himself out.
    Every time there’s another report on TV about the blizzard nobody knew was comin’, the weather bureau moves the number of inches up. Twelve to fifteen inches of snow, one of the weathermen says now, and, a half hour later, he’s talkin’ two feet.
    Dad finally gets home about eight, and can hardly make it up the drive. He’s got snow tires on the Jeep and four-wheel drive, but the wind’s blowin’ the snow in drifts across the road. I can tell by the look on Ma’s face when she hears that Jeep that it’s about the best music in the whole world to her.
    Dad’s real pleased to see all the wood I brung in.
    â€œGood for you, Marty,” he says. “Last I heard, we’re goin’ to need every stick of it. They’re talking thirty inches now.”
    Dara Lynn squeals some more.
    I wake up next morning and look out the window insheer wonder. Dad’s stomping back in the house to say that he can’t move the Jeep one inch—he’d have to shovel all the way down to the road, and then couldn’t go anywhere. Plow hadn’t been down there, either.
    â€œWell, Dara Lynn, looks like you got your wish,” Ma says, turning the French toast over in the skillet.
    It’s only the second time in all the years Dad’s worked for the post office, though, that he hasn’t been able to get his Jeep through, and he worries about people who are waiting for their pension checks.
    â€œEven if the checks got through, nobody could get to a bank to cash them,” says Ma.
    David calls, of course, and tells me they haven’t been plowed out yet down in Friendly, either, and his dad is still trying to get to the newspaper office. Then Ma calls Aunt Hettie in Clarksburg to make sure she’s okay, and finally there’s nothin’ else to do but give in to being snowbound.
    Snow finally stops about noon, and Dad goes out with a yardstick to measure where it’s flat in the yard. Thirty-one and a half inches, not counting six or seven feet along the side of the house and shed where it’s drifted. We shovel a path to the henhouse to get some feed to the chickens.
    Us kids have to go out in it, of course. I take a shovel and dig a path from our porch to a tree, just so Shiloh can do his business. Dara Lynn and Becky, fat as clowns in their snowsuits, scarfs wrapped around their faces, only their eyes peeking out, set to work diggin’ a cave at one side of my path, but Becky no sooner sits down inside it than the roof falls in on her. She’s squallin’,