In order to motivate herself, she had clipped the drawing out of the newspaper and displayed it on her dresser drawer. She would pick it up and look at it whenever she was tempted to leap on her bike and ride down the block to Mr. Schultz’s store. Schultz’s was a wonderland that contained every comic book or candy bar known to mankind and naturally Joanna was a regular customer. Mrs. Schultz got a kick out of her, so when she was sent on a mission to buy a loaf of bread or a bottle of milk, she would usually emerge with a free licorice stick along with her purchase.

The fact that she didn’t have a gift for her dad other than the card caused her great anxiety. She knew her father was planning to find a job, and without a pair of work boots, this would probably be impossible. However, he had chuckled the day before when she’d delivered the bad news.

“Oh, Joanna,” he’d said, “you’re so sweet, but I’ll get the money to buy a pair of shoes soon.” Her father had been touched by his daughter’s sincerity. “And don’t worry about me finding a job. I just heard yesterday that something was going to open up at the Sunoco station in a few weeks.” But Joanna did worry, because her mother worried, and always would say her father had a hard time keeping a job because of his heart condition.

So that is how she came to be in the backyard, shoveling snow, when the event that would alter her life forever occurred.

Her dad’s green and white 1956 Chevy Bel Air was safely tucked away in the garage, but it had snowed heavily the night before and there was close to a foot on the ground. Joanna planned to cut two paths from the garage to the driveway, so that when her dad pulled out he would be able to glide down the driveway the Larsons shared with their next-door neighbor and head straight out onto the street. This proved to be harder than it looked. She was exhausted after shoveling only one path not even six feet long, and realized that her wool mittens made it next to impossible to grip the shovel’s handle. So she took a break for a minute to try to figure things out, toying with her breath in the frosty air.