Rick leaned against his elbow watching her. His collar was opened and his cuffs were rolled up. He stood looking at her long legs propped on the desk. "You're not working; you're looking at the snow." "Snow is interesting." "You can look at snow at home." "Not this snow. The snow at home is Eggertsville snow. I wanted to see Buffalo snow." "It's different in the adjacent suburbs?" "Yep. So what are you doing here? What's so important that tore you away from home and family on Christmas Eve day?" "My wife wasn't home. I was baby-sitting..." "What do you mean 'baby-sitting'? You can't baby-sit your own child. You take care of your own child, you don't baby-sit your own child." "That so?" Rick said coming over to the desk leaning on it with both hands. He had wanted her since he first saw her; and all she ever did was fuss about her ridiculous marriage. Now here she was alone in a dark building in the middle of a snowstorm. "Yeah. And all this time you thought you were babysitting." Chlo raised her eyebrow as if to chide him. "You probably even put it on your resume." Rick moved around the desk and sat beside her foot. Here she was in her expensive looking pant suit. Not worrying about her husband whom Sandy had seen and said was seedy looking. Light shone off the smoothness of his leather belt and Chlo realized that it was getting dark. She remembered how she used to be intimidated by him. That seemed remarkable now. "So, where's your husband?" "My soon to be ex-husband is in Puerto Largo." "And you're up here in the snow? How's a southerner like you going to manage? Down in Maryland 'You All' probably think the snow will go away if you just stand there and stare at it." "Down in Maryland it does go away if we just stand there and stare at it." "Going to be kind of tough here then, isn't it? Here, even if you swear at it, it doesn't go away. But then you probably couldn't swear if your life depended on it." "That's not true, Shithead." Rick laughed a hearty laugh from the diaphragm. "Well I always like to see people expand their vocabulary." "That's why you went into teaching?" "Could be. Or it could be that I went into teaching to meet young women like you. A young woman with the light from streetlights glistening off her golden hair." Rick leaned forward locking her gaze on his, leaned forward ...------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Beyond the Blue Ridge is the Odyssey of an early 70's young woman battling social and professional bias while struggling financially. The novel follows Chlo Adams for thirty years beginning in the early 1970's where racial and gender divides erupted to the point at which they affected those who were eager for change as well as those who were not. The backdrop of the Vietnam War, Nixon, Women's Liberation, Black Power threatened to disrupt national stability. College students were often involved in demonstrations, many young women joined Consciousness Raising Groups (CR groups) because they realized that they had been socially programmed to be subservient. Ordinary young adults had to navigate the changes if they expected to live an "ordinary" family life that came close to what their parents and their parents' parents had lived. This novel was first written in 1987 and put to sleep, so to speak, until now.In the 1970's and into the 1980's, if a woman's boss found out that she was living with a man she was not married to, she would be fired.Now it's standard practice for couples to live together before they marry, and even to buy houses before marrying. The concept of a child born out of wedlock being a bastard is unthought of. In terms of the rate at which social mores have historically changed, this upheaval occurred at lightning speed and those caught in the raging rivers had to navigate them without a guide.