winter wonderland

A blog posting by my old middle-school friend, M, prompted me to think about my relationship to snow. She made a very astute observation about why us Southerners-by-upbringing (and I use the term southern loosely, as some would not consider Virginia southern, per se) are much more appreciative of snow (generally speaking) than Northerners.

Two words: snow days.

I have fond childhood memories of days, sometimes even weeks, off from school--sledding with my friends down treacherous slopes, making snow angels, building forts. Of course, it wasn't all fun and games: sometimes the power went out (once, when I was in 3rd or 4th grade, a power outage at my parents' house afforded me a multiple-day sleepover with one of my close friends; maybe my parents were cold and in the dark, but I was having a grand old time). Also, snow days meant we had to make up class over other holidays (like Memorial Day), and the School Board could tack on up to something like 10 more days of school in June. But somehow none of this mattered. The sight of snow still fills me with childlike glee despite its ubiquity here in "lake effect" land.

And now that April has safely made it back home from her visit this past weekend--after being stranded here for a day when the airport shut down during our mini-blizzard on Monday--I can speak freely and say that, as frustrating as the whole flight cancellation fiasco was, I still found our first snowstorm of the season immeasurably beautiful. I mean, if I can still love snow after all the havoc it caused last year--ice damming, heavy roof leakage, basement flooding--then my affection must be quite deep-seated indeed.

Snow appreciation is a tenuous issue, though, geographically speaking. My friends who come from warmer climes (California, for example, or Georgia) do not appreciate the snow at all because they find the entire idea of being cold anathema to their general existence. Friends who grew up in the North, Midwest or Canada tend to think of snow as just something to be endured (unless they're skiers or snowboarders, but that's another story) because it afforded them no school-free pleasure as children. Perhaps you need to be from somewhere with relatively moderate weather--and where the city does not keep an adequate number of snowplows on hand--to find that delicate balance of the ability to tolerate colder weather while still appreciating snow's, I don't know, snowy-ness.

Or maybe it's just me, rhapsodizing about snow on my blog at two in the morning. Who knows.