Finally, Snow!

I like snow. I grew up in Cleveland, where when it snows, it snows.  The “lake effect” of the cold air moving over the warm waters of Lake Erie produce enormous buckets of the stuff… plenty to play in, plenty to wade through up to your knees.

Outside my window when I was a little girl there was a huge Elm tree.  On cold January mornings, the first thing I would look for when I woke up was the branches of that tree. I rejoiced if there was an inch or so of the white stuff.  It looked like the icing on a cake.  Hooray! Out of bed I would jump. Ready to start the day, ready to play.

 I can remember being stuffed into a light blue one-piece snow suit, wrapping a scarf around my neck, then being sent off to play in the beautiful snow. My sister and would try to make words with our feet, writing our names in the fresh snow. We would drag sleds out into the yard, where we had a hill just steep enough for a short ride.

I would sometimes go out in our expansive back yard by myself, probably in the morning. It was especially wonderful on bright sunny mornings, the day after a big storm. The clean, unmarked new snow would sparkle in the sunshine like little jewels.

I live in Nebraska now. There’s not much snow during a “normal” winter (whatever that is these days), but this winter has been especially lacking. For a few weeks last month it we had a week of sub-zero temperatures and it was cold and windy and brown. Brown. Really? When it’s that cold, wouldn’t you feel warmer if there was snow banked up on the sides of the house? Even in normal winters when it’s that cold we might have a few inches of bitter, stinging snow pellets blowing around. Once the weather reporter actually said it would be difficult to measure how much snow had fallen because it was so windy it wouldn’t stay on the ground long enough to stick in a ruler to measure it.

 Now I am old, I know I’m supposed to hate winter. It makes it hard to drive, etc etc etc. All that may be true, But anyone who truly understands me, knows that when there’s a winter storm warning, I get a little excited. When I say “it’s a winter wonderland!” I’m not really being ironic. In Nebraska it is rare to have the kind of snowfall with big white flakes floating down covering everything, like soft down.
A fresh snowfall can make the most mundane of landscapes seem like a sweet, sugary dessert of fluffiness.

 Today we are having a snowstorm. It is cold and windy and bitter. But it is so beautiful. A day to stay home and watch the world outside my window transform.

Okay, I lied a little bit.  I really Love snow.