Snow Days

We had our first appreciable snow of the winter last night -- 8" -- which I know can only be described as "paltry" by those living in the greater-D.C. area, but at least we finally can't see the grass. And now that it's starting to look like Michigan around here, I can't stop thinking about the magic of snow-anticipation. As an adult (assuming you live in a northern state), waiting for the snow to hit each winter is sort of like waiting for the other shoe to drop: you know it's coming; it's just a matter of when and how hard it will fall. It's simply a question of whether it will be a weekend (coffee first, then shoveling at a leisurely pace) or a work day (shovel faster, double time! starting when it's not fully light out, and hope someone cooks you an egg after your 500-calorie pre-breakfast workout).

But as a child, the anticipation of snow is about more than just its logistics. Sure, there might be sledding and snow angels, snow people and hot chocolate, snow forts built in really good years, and snowballs lobbed at the parents as they shovel. But the real magic lies in the Snow Day -- that often-elusive combination of factors: a big storm with snow mostly falling overnight and into the early morning hours of a normal weekday. None of this Christmas vacation or weekend blizzard stuff. Oh, no. The Snow Day is the pinnacle of snow perfection because you get to stay home from school for a whole day in order to play in the snow.

If you even have to ask how much better this is than playing in the same snow all day on a Saturday, you were never a child.

We don't get snow days very often here in Michigan. We are well-equipped with snow plows and sand-and-salt trucks. We have road crews that can work through the night, and neighbors with snow blowers who will help out in emergencies. And yet, we have a snow day today for a storm that last winter would barely have registered on anyone's Possibly May Create The Need For A Snow Day radar. Last year, we had nearly a foot of snow 10 days before Christmas, and then we shoveled anywhere from two to six new inches of snow off the driveway nearly every single day after that for two weeks. And then, we had a few more good storms throughout January and February. But having had NO storms this year, southeast Michigan finds itself replete with the combination of excitement over a Big Snow and panic over "how do we deal with this stuff again?" And so the schools are closed.

My kids are still at daycare/preschool/latchkey because I have to work. And having been in kindergarten for only 100 days, Son doesn't really have the concept of the magic of a Snow Day that I am sure will hit in another year or so.

But I remember.

Of course, I grew up outside of Atlanta, where snow days are even fewer and farther between than they are in southeast Michigan. It rarely snows down there. But when it does, and if it doesn't melt as soon as it hits the warm pavement, there is simply nothing to do but wait. I recall one winter in middle school when it snowed about ten inches, and we were out of school for four days. FOUR days. Because there are no snow plows in the entire city of Atlanta except at the airport, and no one knows how to drive in snow, and so when there is a snowfall like that, all you can do is get out your cookie sheets and use them to slide down the hill in front of your house, then to bake some cookies to get warm, then to slide down the hill in front of your house some more. Until the snow melts.

In the South, on a snow day, you will carry out myriad magical projects dressed in the most bizzare of layers: tights underneath jeans; two pairs of socks, with plastic grocery bags over your feet and tucked into the sock tops before you put on your tennis shoes (who owns boots? no one, that's who); two more pairs of socks serving as mittens; a wool beret for a hat. If the roads are somewhat icy rather than just snowy, you will walk to your friend's house in ice skates (people take skating lessons, even in the South) rather than tennis shoes because they are far safer. Your best friend's mother will come to pick up you and her from school 45 minutes before the school is officially closed early for the day, and she will mortify your seventh grade selves not only by making you leave early but by adding to the absurd spectacle of your exit by insisting that you walk underneath the most enormous black umbrella on the planet all the way back to their house, so that you will be protected from the non-existent-but-it-could-happen-at-any-moment-and-you-can-never-be-too-careful falling limbs of trees.

You will sled and snowball fight and build forts and make snow angels right in the middle of the street because no one is driving anyway. Parents will let their preschoolers sled down the hill and into the cross street because the likelihood of traffic coming is as high as the likelihood of a moose showing up.

You will grow up remembering every tiny detail of the few precious snowstorms of your youth. And then you will go to college in Vermont, and when the snow starts to fly in October, you will race downstairs to the dorm room of your best friends and beg them to come out for a walk with you. And then will agree. But they will take a long time putting on their boots, and finding their wallets, and twiddling with their stuff as you shift impatiently from one foot to the next and look anxiously out the window all the time. "Hurry UP!" you will demand. "Calm down," they will say, looking at you funny. "But what if it stops snowing?" you lament. And they will burst out laughing and tell you, "Friend, it's not going to stop snowing until April."

And then you will realize that the childish anticipation, the glee at the sight of real flakes, the eagerness with which you throw yourself out into the weather, is partly a product of its rarity up until now. And you will laugh at your own panic ("when I was growing up, if we didn't get our shoes on the minute it started snowing, we might miss it completely"). But you will still feel vaguely anxious to get out into the snow right this minute. And you will wonder if you will always feel this way.

I'm here to tell you, twenty years later, that you still might. The snow, though it comes more predictably, and though it has to be removed through real labor, and though it is slippery to drive in and inconvenient, the snow is magical. It is fluffy and cleansing and crisp. It is the perfect for the quiet hiss...hiss... of cross-country skis breaking new tracks. It muffles and blankets, surrounds and embraces, transforms and invigorates the landscape.

Snow days, it seems, still have the power to enchant.