Snow Days
Yes, I am an 11 year old stuck in a thirty-something body. I love snow days, and I check the ten day forecast obsessively for the possibility of snow from Thanksgiving until mid-March.
Until today, there has been nothing in my area. This morning, when I logged on to Weather.com and my zipcode popped up, not one, not two, but THREE possible snow days were brought to my attention. The disappointment I feel when the snow doesn’t come hasn’t faded since my childhood, and the joy upon awakening to a thick blanket of snow and a responsibility-free day has only increased over time. Snow days are my return to childhood.
Growing up in the south, my early experiences with snow days were laughable. Should a school administrator see a few errant flakes, school was cancelled. My parents, refugees from the great white north, enjoyed poking fun at the expense of the locals stocking up on “Mee-yulk and h-white bray-ud.” I knew what real snow was. I returned to my parents’ hometowns and sledded and skied at Christmastime. Real snow has to have a special spot in a parking lot, sometimes several stories high. Real snow might come up to your waist, at least if you’re nine. Real snow turned gross colors before it disappeared. Real snow required special footwear.
I should mention that my thrifty mother never bothered to purchase proper winter footwear for me and my siblings since we only spent a week or so in the snowy north each year. She improvised with Nature’s Own bread bags over our tennis shoes, secured with rubber bands. As you might imagine, the results were mediocre at best and my outdoor playtime was often cut short by cold, wet feet.
Once we left the deep south and headed to more mountainous terrain, my real snow day experiences began. My family lived in an area that expected snow and was prepared for it in theory. In reality, they had enough plows to keep the interstates passable. Our first winter there went by with no sign of the white stuff.
One morning in early April, I heard a strange noise from outside my bedroom window. It was a dull, muffled scraping–metal on asphalt, and it was near constant, waking me from a sound sleep at 5 AM. I got up to peek out the window into the early morning darkness. The driveway was lit from above and my dad was shoveling two paths up the driveway as snow fell heavily, covering the asphalt he’d already cleared.
Snow! Lots of it! Over a foot of perfect, fluffy snow! I was relieved, I remember, because I had stayed up late doing old math homework in my new walk-in closet. (Mom only checked the light under my door, she never peeked in on me at night.) My 6th grade math teacher didn’t check homework from day to day, only once every few weeks, and only a few problems from each assignment. Naturally, I waited until the night before the homework was due to do any of it. I hadn’t finished and this snow would provide me with a glorious reprieve from that work and any other school work.
I went back to bed in preparation for a long day of playing.
Play I did. My siblings and I traipsed around with our Nature’s Own boots and two pairs of sweatpants for snow pants. We explored the houses being built in our neighborhood. One builder had shoveled all the snow that had accumulated on the exposed second floor framing of a then roofless building into a big pile on the ground below a large hole in the frame. We jumped off the second floor into that pile several times until I got scratched up by a nail. I rubbed some snow on it and carried on.
Then we followed footprints into the woods and eventually found ourselves by a pretty little lake. (Pretty in the snow, at least.) This lake would end up the site of many misadventures for all of us. In addition to being a relatively secluded small body of water with a dock perfect for fishing and driving small, self-propelled vehicles off, it was on the property of an all-boys boarding school. Trouble. But not for a few years.
Objectively, that little lake was crappy, but to me and my brothers, we might as well have discovered Atlantis. We went out on the dock, broke the ice with our makeshift boots, got my youngest sibling soaked to his ankles and we had to carry him home, piggyback. I remember feeling that we were so far from home and that our parents might never find us if we got lost. In reality, we were less than a mile from home. Luckily, the snow was not falling fast anymore, and our footprints leading back to the house were easy enough to find.
That night, my dad got home and he got out the toboggan that had sat useless for so many years at our old home. He carefully chose the wax, according to the temperature and type of snow, he explained solemnly, and applied it in broad strokes to the wood on the bottom. He brought the toboggan outside, and loaded us on it–youngest in front, oldest in back. Our first few trips down the hill in front of our house were slow going. Dad more or less walked along beside us and pushed us. Once we packed down a good path and got the whole family on board, we were flying down the hill.
We were out of school for over a week. The snow got a little old in the daytime as our “boots” never dried out, but every night we waited for dad to get home and take out the toboggan. We would have hot chocolate afterward, and Mom always watered it down too much. We begged every night to have a fire in the fireplace which had never been used. Every night, my dad insisted that it was too cold for a fire. I still don’t understand that.
The night before we went back to school, I returned to the homework I had been putting off, lamenting that I hadn’t spent a little time on it each day. It’ s that dreadful cycle of guilt that I’m still trying to shake to this day.
