Snow Daze

I am looking out the window and watching my daughters play with what is left of the snow. Our first and only snow of the season occurred last night, and less than twenty four hours later, it is all done. We got about four to six inches of the powdery stuff, which is a major weather event in this part of the country. Roads are impassable. Schools and government offices are closed. Power is out for some, and staying warm and dry seems like a distant memory, kind of like a 401K. Of course, by now, right before dinnertime the day after the snow actually fell, the roads in my neighborhood are practically dry.

When I was a kid growing up in Florida, we didn’t have snow days. We didn’t have hurricane days either. We went to school, day in, day out, unless there was a power outage that caused the classrooms to get hot enough to cook our little brains. They couldn’t have us dropping like flies, even though it was in the era before lawsuits. Here in South Carolina, three snow days are built into the school year. We usually use one of them, and today is that day.

My kids started the day by waking up about fifteen minutes earlier than they normally do, and before I ever have to wake them for school, excited by the Currier and Ives image out the window. (As an aside, my grandmother once referred to a beautiful snowy vista as a Burl Ives, showing either the depths of her dementia or a deep love of the Rankin/ Bass classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”) My theory is the blinding white reflection of sun off the snow covered lawn made it seem like noon on their little sleeping eyelids. Whatever the reason, we had to get up and fed so we could go out to play.

Now, as I have mentioned too many times already, it only snows once a year, so it’s not like we have actual snow gear to put on. Only one of my daughters has functional boots, but they aren’t snow boots, they are rain boots, and they are two sizes too small. The other one has red suede boots, which she tries to wear every time there is some sort of puddle on the ground. They are also two sizes too small, but I am not the one with the blisters, so what do I care? Our mismatched assortment of mittens might not even be ours. I regard their mittens as the school lost and found equivalent of the “have a penny-need a penny” dish at the convenience store. The rest of the family has hats, but I don’t, so I wear a horrible pair of beige ear muffs, the same color of undercooked biscuits ,that refuse to stay on my huge skull. Nothing is water proof or insulated, so going out to play never lasts longer than twenty minutes before hypothermia and potential toe loss sets in.

After we finally trudged outside like a pack of hobos, we tried our hand at making a snowman. Our snow wasn’t the good kind that you can pack nicely into sparkly orbs. Ours was powdery on top and crusty underneath, since it rained for hours before the snow started and stopped and started again. Not good snowman snow. Instead of Frosty, we had these piles that looked like termite mounds protruding all over the lawn. We don’t sled, as that would involve owning a sled, but we do have one of those worthless plastic saucers that won’t slide down the gently sloping driveway if anything over 40 pounds sits on it. What used to launch the kids across the street into the neighbor’s lawn now sat immobile under their growing asses. Next came the obligatory snow ball fight. Again, this was not packing snow. But if we dug down deep enough with our unfortunate mittens, we got these giant hunks of crusty ice we then lobbed at each other. Until, as happens every year, one rock of snow-ice was thrown by one child too close to the other child’s eye, which meant tears from the injured party as well as the one my husband yelled at. All that took the requisite twenty minutes, followed by another ten minutes of removing all the wet clothing in the garage, followed by more yelling when my hardwood floors resembled Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes after everyone trudged back inside.

Coming in from some intense snow related injury means only one thing to my family: hot cocoa. I used to make it from scratch, measuring out the cocoa, blending it with milk, heating it slowly and lovingly over the stove, whisking the whole time until a delicate froth was achieved before crowning the whole concoction with dainty mini marshmallows. Well, fuck that shit. Instead I found some stale packets of old cocoa from somebody’s birthday party two years ago and topped it with mini marshmallows that were not only expired but possibly petrified. Jet puffed, my ass. The rest of the day was spent trying to not fight with each other as we each slowly died from boredom.

Snow days. One hour of actual enjoyment of snow, followed by twenty three hours of “Shining” level cabin fever. And thanks to an email alert about another day off, I now know we get to do it all again tomorrow, only without the actual snow. Somewhere in Pennsylvania is a groundhog laughing his ass off. I think I hate him as much as the squirrels.