Snow Business

There are days when I think I just shouldn't get out of bed...

Thankfully, today is not one of them. *grin* Though my kids might feel differently...

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A new quiz has been added to my sidebar. A very appropriate one I thought.

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From my online page-a-day calendar:

5 THINGS TO BE HAPPY ABOUT

• a great university library

• a light dusting of snow

• finger food

• a cashmere bathrobe

• waterproof boots

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We had another dusting of snow. Enough to whet the snow appetite of every kid under 16 and cause heart palpitations to the rest of us.

Snow.

It used to be a glorious word.

It meant the possibility of no school...or at least an abbreviated school day. (Remember sitting by the radio from about 6 a.m. onwards?) Sledding for hours until we very literally couldn't feel our fingers or toes and had to defrost them afterwards in a warm bath. Making snowballs and snowangels and snowmen. A whole yard full of homemade snowcones. Hot cocoa and cookies.

Now, it just means cold, wet stuff that you have to shovel in order to get in the car to go somewhere. Dirty, wet shoes that have to be shed by the backdoor so as not to ruin the rest of the floors in the house. Being cold and wet, wet, wet. I much prefer to stay indoors and admire it from the warmth of the couch.

What changed, I wonder?

It was far worse when we lived in the city and had to carve out our parking space and hope that if we left it it wouldn't be snatched immediately by the neighbor who worked third shift and had arrived home, dismayed to find no parking.....only there was that one spot, so nicely dug out....

I think most of the time snow brought out the worst in people.

Except...

I lived in the city during the Blizzard of '96. It was a blizzard that literally buried the Northeast. We had upwards of 40 inches by the time the three storms passed through. Not much for some parts of the world but too much for this part with no where to actually put the snow and no hope of it melting anytime too soon.

I took photos of my car and you can only just see about six inches of my radio antenna. The rest is just a mound of snow.

Since I lived just uptown from the newspaper where I worked, I walked to my job. There were no cars on Fifth Street, normally a fairly busy thoroughfare in Reading. There were kids on sleds and a "hush." Everything seemed muted by the snow. It was actually quite peaceful.

I was the only one from my department to make it in that day. I actually did the section's whole two-page spread by myself....not that anyone noticed. Funny, though.

It was a few days before that peace lifted from the city. I felt sort of sad when it did. The carved-out parking spots were like ice garages, and the city looked snowy white -- clean -- for a little while.

Quite a snowy memory.