Cold Winter Essays - Startup Cult, David Meece,

Cold Winter It was in the middle of winter on a dark smoggy night, chills were running through the house in and out of my room like a quiet ghost silently coming and silently going. As I lie awake in my bed thinking of what the next day should bring, my eye's start to grow heavy as I doze off. In the distance I hear a faint booming sound, soon it starts getting louder and louder and still louder until I could hear nothing but the noise. I was unpleasantly startled and hurried over to my window. As I look out I could see nothing but smoke and fire, catching this by surprised I ran to my little brother's room, finding no one. Then in the distance I could hear faint voices of terror calling my name. It sounded as if it was coming from out side, so I ran as fast as my Nike slippers could carry me down the stairs and outside into my front yard. I find the rest of my family there, along with my neighbors and their son, my best friend. I just stood there in horror with the rest of my family and friends. We had no idea what had happened. The next morning I really don't remember very clearly, but what I do remember was reading the news paper and coming across an article about a house burning down not to far from mine. I really didn't know what exactly to think at that time until it all clicked upstairs. The noise the night before had been the house burning down and the natural gas line exploding. Later in the article it said that our block of houses wouldn't have any natural gas heating until the line was repaired. The first thing I did was run to the kitchen, finding my Mother and Father there fixing breakfast. I started talking so fast I really don't even know what came out. My Mom told me to calm down and sit at the table. Doing so she gave me a glass of milk, and seeing that I was distressed sat down next to me and asked me what was on my mind. Taking full advantage of her attention I told her as slowly and detailed as possible at the time being. As soon as I had finished my frantic attempt to get all that out, she didn't laugh at me but just got that look in her eyes where you know that she didn't believe a word of it. The fist thing she said in response was "Where did you hear about this?" I answered her as fast as possible "In the news paper". Stunned at my at my quick answer she told me to bring her the article. So I ran back up the stairs and snatched the paper from my bed. When I got down stairs I laid the article out flat in front of my mom's face. A subtle but shocked look arose on my mother's face, as she sank deeper into her chair. Shutting off the radio, I sat down next to my dad asking him what we were going to do for heat, he just answered "I don't know I just don't know." shaking his head in resistance. Later that day I was over at a friend's house who had heat. We were playing a video game and eating chips in his living room. The walls had many game heads on them, one of the nicer ones was a whole stuffed mountain lion that his dad once had a special tag to hunt. The whole time I was there I was brainstorming on how to get heat in our house. Soon I was in the back seat of our extended cab black GMC pickup. My little brother was on my mom's lap and my dad was just starting to drive onto the onramp. Which is not an easy task on a daily basis, when you live in Detroit. As soon as we started getting close to the freeway there was a huge traffic jam. I think we must have been there for about and hour and a half. I don't really remember because I was trying to go to sleep. When I woke up we were on the freeway driving about 40 m.p.h. because there were so many cars. But soon we were back in my neighborhood. We stopped at the local McDonald's to get some lunch. Luckily my dad