Snow Day

We were warned, and sure enough sometime after midnight on December 1, 2006, the clouds opened up, as if to tell us that today is the real beginning of winter, and don’t you forget it. First came sleet, then snow. It was still snowing at 6:30 in the morning when I got a call telling me that Lilly had no school. By about 10, it had stopped. We’d had about a foot of snow, judging by my unscientific eyeballing.

For Lilly and Ann, it meant snowballs and snow angels and half-hearted attempts at snowmen during three or four expeditions outside during the day, though Ann’s relative inexperience with snow usually meant she’d get her gloves or something wet, and cry to come inside because her hands were cold. The snowmen never really got anywhere because the snow wasn’t that heavy, and thus hard to agglomerate; because of inattention on the part of the girls; and because several times when a ball got of a certain size, Lilly would decide to throw it instead of making it bigger. Some of those masses were big enough to be snowman brains, I told them.

Ann made a snowball she liked so much that she brought it inside to play with, putting it on a plastic plate. For a while, it was in the refrigerator, but eventually it went the way of all snow.

Yuriko and I worked in shifts, shovelling the driveway, so that she was able to leave for her office at about 10 – late, but no one else was much earlier, since it had taken most of the morning for the smaller roads to get snowplow treatment. She reported seeing abandoned cars, run off some of the bigger roads at various angles. I like to think of these as the same sort of people who tailgate me in their hurry to get to the next red light, but I know that life on the road isn’t quite that fair.