The night I was trapped at Nana’s

Our friends the Roots have a party every year the weekend before Christmas. The first year we went, Gina and I were dating. She was living with her mom. The drive to Nana’s is half an hour of barren rural roads, with two stoplights to spice things up. It’s not a snowplow priority. And the flakes were already coming down as I went to pick Gina up.

Once you’re five minutes out of Gina’s hometown, everything’s dark at night. There’s no streetlights and little traffic. The snow was drifting already. We were starting down the long country stretch when three deer leapt out in front of us. They were all in a row and they looked like ghosts as they appeared out of the snow. I didn’t have time to think, but somehow we didn’t hit any of them. Gina and I are convinced it was our guardian angel at work.

Once we stopped hyperventilating we continued onto the party, where we both got to sit on Santa’s lap. We should have asked him for a ride home. We came back to my house, but seeing the weather we decided to head back early.

By then the snow was a blizzard and the back roads were impassable. I turned around shortly after the point where I couldn’t see a thing.

“You’re going to have to spend the night tonight,” I said. Gina wasn’t for it. Apparently her mother comes from the school of thought where it’s more appropriate for a woman to succumb to frostbite than to spend the night at her boyfriend’s. So after some debate we were back on the road, this time on an alternate route.

The other way to Nana’s takes you down two well-traveled roads but involves a lot of backtracking. It took three hours to get there from the time we started from home. This was one of the weekends Nana had six people over to sleep: Gina’s brother Jim and five of the kids. Gina’s sister Sue and nephew Chris were also sleeping over, so between all of the company there was no room in the inn. So Gina volunteered to sleep on the floor and let me have her bed.

I knew that her nieces, Angie and Amy, always crawled into bed with Gina in the middle of the night. As Gina tucked me into her bed while everyone else was asleep, I envisioned a nightmare scenario: Amy and Angie would come to snuggle thinking that I was their aunt, and when they realized it was me they would wake up the whole house. I was more afraid of two six-year-old girls than I was of the blizzard outside.

Gina did her best to calm my nerves, than went to sleep in the living room. I lay in bed and tried my best. Then the snoring began. It was Jim, and the only relief I got was when the furnace kicked in. It was just loud enough to drown him out. I tried falling asleep to the blower. I managed a nap and got up around 6:00, determined to head home. Quiet as a mouse, I crept through the hallway and into the living room. Gina was asleep on the floor. And standing in her nightgown was Nana.

“I see we had another guest last night,” she said without batting an eye. I told her of our epic adventure and that it was time to go home, then kissed Gina’s forehead after figuring out which silhouette was hers.

By then the plows had found their way to the lowly back roads to Nana’s. I made my way home and crawled into bed in peaceful solitude.

Gina still laughs when she thinks of me with her sheets up to my neck, gripping the edges as tightly as I held the steering wheel.