“I don’t know what to do about your eyes.”

Never enough. Never enough. A parent can never, ever do enough.

I had the makings of a song.

Gloveless, scarfless, with my down jacket still unbuttoned up top—I’d forgotten about me.

Soon after we set off, it became clear that, because of the snow, our stroller wasn’t going to work. So, with the wind whipping and the need to think fast, I turned us around. Back home, I left the stroller in the vestibule and hurried to our storage closet in the basement to fetch Tim’s childhood sled. Outside, I wrapped the boys in an old blue blanket, set them on the sled, and pulled them behind me.

We were halfway down Hicks Street before I noticed other parents dragging their kids by the wrist, slipping and sliding, or struggling with strollers. Men and women, dressed for work, leaned into the wind as they headed toward the subway station on Clark Street, stepping gingerly, hoping not to fall. And here I came, pulling Teddy and Sam, the only children in the Heights riding to school on a sled. Glancing back, I could see them squinting in the way that comes only when they’re smiling. And suddenly, that great unreasonable distance we traveled each morning to R Kids Count Learning Center became a blessing. Some children were getting rides in carpools, and others would be arriving by car service and taxi. But the boys and I were envied—one stiff parent, Chad the Wall Street whiz, surprised me by shouting from the corner of Pierrepont and Hicks, in a manner half amused, half in awe, “Now, that’s the way to travel.”

For once I was the clever mother, the only mother with this rather terrific idea, and my boys, Teddy and Sam Welch, were content.

These are the moments, I wanted to sing. These are the moments.

“Canceled,” Maria (always perky) Spence called out from her Range Rover on the corner of Pineapple Street.

“But why?”

“Boiler. Broken. Call me. Playdate sometime.” She had to go, her cell phone was ringing, and she drove on.

Teddy didn’t understand why we were turning around.

“The school has no heat, sweetie,” I said. “You’ll freeze, and we wouldn’t want that.”

“But I wanna go!”

With my promise of hot chocolate, Teddy calmed down. As I pulled the sled up Henry Street to Montague, Sam said, “Daddy, work,” and pointed toward the neo-Gothic ex-German Lutheran church that housed most of Montague Academy. On nice days, I often took the boys to the courtyard garden, where they climbed on the lower school’s playground equipment. This was not to be one of those days.

Instead, we turned right on Montague and headed down to Muffins and More. Across the street, Starbucks was doing impressive business. I preferred, as did the other mothers in my circle, the locally owned Muffins and More, which, rumor had it, was in danger of going out of business, but not if we could help it.