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Chapter 1 

     I'll bet you think that a sass mouth teen with short dark curly hair who was always getting into one fix after another could never become an angel, right?  Maybe, but as I leaned way out over the window sill to look at the trees crusted with ice in a winter fairyland, it was exactly what I was wishing.  Sun sparkled the snow and ice like a million prisms this particular morning.   If ever a  wish could come true, surely this was the perfect fairytale setting needed to enkindle it. 

     Kathy, my little sister,  came to gawk with me, and I edged over so that she could see the wonder.  On her side of the house, the windows looked out over our patch of woods where every tree glistened with its magical coat of ice, and we'd go to her window next, but we both liked looking over the rolling hills of snow interrupted now and then with an icy fingered tree. 

     Nearer the house, stood a wall of lilacs, now bare of all leaves but one that had somehow frozen stubbornly in a curious dance high on the bush. They, too, sparkled with the layer of ice coating them, and clicked in the wind as the branches brushed each other.  A lone cardinal stuffed his red cheeks with seeds from the feeder hanging from the peach tree Momma provided for the wild birds that filled our woods.  The sun had just come up, and life was full of wondrous possibilities, for it was less than one month from Christmas in the country. 

     Downstairs, Momma was making breakfast, and the smell of homemade bread toasting in the oven wafted through the house.  Later today there would be baking, and Kathy and I would get to eat a hot cinnamon roll right from the oven smothered in rich creamy butter.  Tonight, however, was the frosting on my Christmas cake.  We would drive through the snow to the Baptist church, and get our parts for their annual Christmas Pageant. 

     We weren't Baptists, but that didn't seem to matter to Pastor Settler.  He loved children, and Christmas, and the more people he could crowd into his tiny church on Christmas Eve, the better.  Besides, during winter in the country, everyone went to the nearest church because travel was difficult. 

     I especially liked Pastor Settler and his wife.  They both had red hair.  Sister Settler's thick dark red hair was cut short in a twenties bob with bangs that were cut straight over her dark eyebrows.  Her nose tilted ever so pertly over wide smiling lips.  She always wore a fox piece over her coat, or suit, or sweater, and a flat hat with a net veil.  I wondered if she wore them to do the dishes. 

     Pastor Settler's carrot hued locks sprung about his head like a curly halo, and he wore farm boots with his suit, and an overcoat that he wouldn't button.  They forged the snowy rural roads in their old ford coupe with chains on their tires to take home the kids farthest out, like my sister and me. 

     This year had produced the deepest snow we had seen in Virginia in some time.  The drifts packed up against our front door, and covered the  windows.  Jack Frost painted the ones that weren't covered with snow drifts upstairs.  We had to shovel out a tunnel through both the back and front doors to go out and take care of the animals. 

   The snow was so deep that we had an airplane drop food to us from the air to see us through until the roads were plowed.  Our community mailbox, creatively mounted on a wagon wheel and axle contraption that spun around for the mailman to dispense our mail, was completely covered with snow.  That didn't matter because we'd had no mail in over a week. 

     I guessed that there would be mail tomorrow, because the snow plows had finally come yesterday, and a few brave souls were creeping over the ice in their cars.  School had been out from the heavy snows for over a week.  The snow was too deep to play in, so my sister and I were really looking forward to getting out of the house by attending the practice.  That year I was a grown up sixteen, and she was a lowly nine.