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by Gia M
grades 3-5
Alone on the boardwalk, 8 year old Sophia was watching everyone slowly disappear as winter grew near. Her parents worked at the boardwalk and their business was starting to decrease like it usually does at this time of year. Sophia didn’t have a babysitter so she decided to come to work with her parents and help them get customers. She thought that it is much more fun to get customers for her parents than to just sit at home by herself. That day when they went home Sophia’s parents got a call from their boss. After they got off the phone she knew that it wasn’t good news by the look on their faces. At dinner her parents told her that they had gotten fired. Sophia was really sad. She thought that going to the boardwalk was the fun part of the day. But since the customers were so low they didn’t have enough money to pay her parents. Sophia had a secret though. She actually liked to go to the boardwalk because she had a secret love for winter. Everything about it Sophia adored. The snow and all the things you could do with it, the hot chocolate with the tiny marshmallows, the blankets to cover you from the cold, or the blazing fire. Sophia would have to stay home alone now because her parents would have to find jobs. So the next day Sophia was home alone and immediately went into her backyard to play in the snow when she found a note in the snow that was written in some unusual code. Sophia played outside in the snow for a little more time and then went inside to try to decipher the code. She opened her laptop and researched it as much as she could. Sophia was really good on the computer so it was extremely frustrating for her when she couldn't decipher the code. So the next day after her parents left she went out into her backyard and started to dig furiously until she found another paper and Sophia went inside as soon as she found the paper this time. It took her the rest of Christmas break but she finally deciphered it. It was a paper with many facts about winter. Sophia thought that it was a horrible way to spend her break, but once she knew what it was Sophia knew there was no other way she would rather spend her break. Every day when Sophia came home from school and finished her homework she went straight for her secret cupboard that she only could open. It held the winter facts. Even if she had the most things to do in the world Sophia always would make sure to learn more and more about winter every day and squeeze it in.