A Week of Weather

Monday brought in 10 inches of snow.

Although the lines at the cafeteria were a little longer...

...for most of the natives around here, it was business as usual.

While I was shoveling, the two words that came to mind for the snow were "myocardial infarction." But it didn't take long for that Michigan girl to burst to the surface.Yes, its "good packin!" So I did what you do with that. Right at the street, to make the sourpusses smile.

I finished every household chore that had been on the list since 1997, paid all the bills, read all the blogs on six world wide webs, and ordered seeds for the garden that must be there in the yard, somewhere. I made a pot of veggie chili with every thing in the refrigerator that once was a vegetable and not yet quite a fungus. And then, because I still had energy even after the treadmill, I got out the ladder and washed every single white beam in our bedroom.

It was all so soft and fluffy.

And then came Wednesday. Which was not.

It started like this.

And then turned into this.

And then this.

The tree didn't do any damage but it sure was a scary sound. One of many, actually. And even though we lost power for the day,we have a generator, which worked. So many around us are still without power, which isn't expected to return until Sunday. Folks have trees in their bedrooms, on their cars, at the foot of their driveways. Its pretty sobering.

So, with all chores done from the Monday storm, what else can you do but this?

No, not a Polar Unicorn. I just started on the head.

SNOW DAY!!

The phone rings at 5 am. I then trudge into my little girls' bedrooms, manuevering my way through a minefield of opened books,wet towels,single shoes, my socks, spoons,and bowls full of some petrified mass that may or may not have once been spaghetti and I thought I told you no food in your room...

...and I search for their warm little heads buried beneath the covers. I push back their hair and whisper into their ears. The words every child longs to hear.

"No school today. Snow day."

Snow day. It means wiping the slate of Plans for Today clean and just letting the snow--and whatever else--fall all over the calendar. Now, without any kids in the house, I can experience the thrill of Snow Day without the agony of spilled hot cocoa, encrusted pancake batter, and layers and layers of wet clothes piled in a heap on the kitchen floor.

I got a Snow Day this week, the day after hitting my moody bottom in Pencilville. The Snow Day brought me this:

It brought me a glorious romp in the field with the dogs, who ran in a continuous spiral for 20 minutes, zeroing in only to get their treats. Which were snowballs. (Nobody ever accuses boxers of high level cognition, the kind that would make them realize that they could master their own treats just by looking down.)

Like the best snow days of all, the snow on this Snow Day was good-packing. Does anyone else remember this all important criterion? Good packing. It means the pickings will be ripe for a most excellent snowball fight, a great snow man, or a double-wide snow fort--in fact, I remember one fourth grade recess where the entire class worked on one snowball until all 30 of us could no longer push it forward.

Yes, in Michigan in the 1960s, unlike Pennsylvania in the 2000s, we went to school when it snowed. (We also had 30 kids in the class and apparently managed to learn how to read and write anyway.) We had recess on the playground, not in front of a video. Great recess in fact, because girls got to wear pants, if only under skirts and dresses. We were allowed to throw snowballs at each other, always mindful of The Boy Who Got Hit in the Eye by a Snowball and Went Blind (a close relative, no doubt, of The Girl Who Looked at the Sun During an Eclipse and Went Blind).

Oh, damn, I am just sentences short of lapsing into an angry post about what is wrong with childhood today. So I will stop here and say what I came to say: I love Snow Days.