Snow Days

Snow Days

Snow days provide the excitement of gambling without the expenditures, or the addiction. The anticipation, hope, growing excitement as the weather forecasts are analyzed and discussed all contribute to the euphoria when a snow day is finally declared, and kids don’t have to go to school. Snow days provide a forced, spontaneous vacation.

Even our guests from Inner Mongolia got the importance of snow days. I picked them up one October night from a dinner they’d attended. In the car, they asked me in halting English about Vermont weather.

Much snow?

Oh yes.

When much snow, school?

No Sirree!

Everyone in the car cheered.

As a child, part of the thrill was having grown-up power trumped by good old Mother Nature. School was closed. Order and obligation went out the window. Your mother could bundle you up and send you out to shovel and play, but later she had to preside over baking sessions or long Monopoly games, while your soggy mittens steamed in front of the stove, drying.

At boarding school, we’d listen to WBZ out of Boston, as the school closings were listed alphabetically by town. When our school, which, after all, had to accommodate day students and teachers, was named, there was a school-wide shriek of joy. No one I knew went back to bed. We threw on clothes, tore outside, went to breakfast where we stuffed ourselves, dashed around visiting friends, glorying in our temporary freedom from schoolwork. Some girls would go downtown, some would go sliding on lunch trays, a diligent few would start homework early. By dinnertime, we were a subdued lot, facing the inevitability of reality closing in once again.

As an adult, the thrill didn’t diminish, at least for me. When we lived in a small Massachusetts town, we’d listen to the radio for our school district, near the end of the list. We’d do roughly the same things I’d done as a child. For my children, the day included hours of fort building, snowball fights, and sledding, punctuated with breaks for dry mittens and cocoa. We read aloud, made popcorn, watched videos, played Monopoly. I usually tried to interest them in some kind of art project. I still have the scrimshaw they made out of plaster of Paris and the Indian necklaces on leather bootlaces.

We’ve had three days of snow over the weekend. The meteorologists have called it a “disorganized storm”. Look out the window and you’ll see Antarctica—snow blowing everywhere, sub-zero temperatures. The shoveling and plowing we did were undone by more snow and wind. The predictions are that the storm will subside in time to return to school and work tomorrow.

I really need to get to town, and am growing tired of holing up at home. But the lure of that freedom--like I’m being given a day—is still strong. Now school closings are listed on the Internet.

I’ll be up early, checking, just to make sure.