I woke up the other day to discover that the world was covered in a white powdery substance that I hadn’t seen in 30 years. It instantly transported me back to my childhood in Connecticut. I wanted to turn on the radio to see if my school was having a snow day.
We moved to Florida when I was 10 years old, so all my memories of snow are delightful ones. I played in it. I didn’t have to shovel it or drive in it or worry about the heating bill or frozen pipes. My mother would spend 20 minutes bundling me into my snow suit so I’d look like the Michelin Tire Man, and I’d go play for 15 minutes and then want to come back inside, and I’d expect a hot drink to be waiting for me. I’m amazed I survived to adulthood. And in college in North Carolina we’d steal trays from the cafeteria and go sledding, and have epic snowball fights.
So here I was, all grown up and looking at this transmuted snowy landscape and I immediately got excited. I took pictures. I let my dogs out. They’d never seen snow in their lives. Devo took it in stride. Blue, on the other hand, is a bit high maintenance. He doesn’t like to get his feet wet. So he stood on the back stoop and barked at it indignantly, then came inside and pooped on the living room carpet.
After cleaning up after my dumb dog, it suddenly occurred to me that I was going to have to drive in this stuff. I still had to go to work. And I’ve never driven in snow in my life. I got lucky, though. Most of it had already melted off the pavement. Still, I took it extremely slowly. I managed to make it to work without killing myself or anybody else, but it was a miracle because my defroster doesn’t work and there was ice on the inside of my windshield. And when I left work to come home, my door lock was frozen and I had to climb in from the passenger side.
It wasn’t pretty, but I got the job done. It’s all part of adjusting to my new life. I kind of like the idea that every once in a while I will look out the window and what I will see will be transformed. What a concept.
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