Southern Snow Day

Today is a snow day…but so far it’s a rainy cold day.

We are all waiting and watching the weather, snow supposedly approaching.

Here in the South, snow causes paralysis. You can’t go anywhere, as my previous post of being snow-stranded attests. And if that’s not enough, take a read through last year’s hairy adventure driving home in the snow.

So… it’s a big deal if we might have 4 inches of snow this afternoon.  We’re all home from work and school, some hoping and waiting for snow and some crossing their fingers we miss it (can’t blame them, after our last episode).

I personally love a snow day and adore the falling snowflakes, despite the chaos it can cause. It is a magical thing here in the South; a gift that is never guaranteed. Some winters we have no snow; some only a few flurries; and rarely do we have a big, dangerous event. Remember the ’93 blizzard, anyone? Sleeping by the fire in our den, eating smokey-tasting soup cooked in our fireplace day after day, carving paths through the snow for a lost duck and a cold neighbor… for a week without power…. Fun times.

Feeling the impending winter doom hanging over us in the gray, clouded sky, wondering if we will actually see a snow flake or not, this morning I read an article by Rick Bragg, aptly entitled “Dixie Snow.” Speaking of the wonderment we Southerners feel when it snows, he writes:

I still feel it, some, when I see children rush into a snowfall that could not cover pea gravel. I see them using spatulas and spoons to scrape up enough snow to make the saddest snowmen you have ever seen, more red mud than anything else. They last a day, or a morning, and then become forlorn lumps. I have seen children make snow angels in what, mostly, seemed to be slick gravel. But I love to see them try.

-“Dixie Snow” by Rick Bragg, in Southern Living January 2014

It’s true. Countless images of my kids (okay, okay, and me…) come to mind: rushing outside at the first sign of snow, trying to catch some on your tongue before the flurries stop, making snow angels in a half-inch layer of snow while getting mud on your back, making tiny snowmen just to show you can. It’s a special gift, the magic of snow, when you don’t get to see it everyday.

But as the saying goes, “make sure you have plenty of milk and bread”…

“Snow Angel,” 6×6 watercolor doodle