Snow daze

My fingers are too grasped around a tissue to grab a camera and head outside to illustrate this. So maybe you can look out your own window at the snow, or close your eyes and revel in the magic of snow days.

First, much to my son's chagrin, this isn't one, at least not yet. He's at school, no doubt paying more attention to the falling flakes than to Aristophanes.

Here at home, you can't help but watch the snow either. To remember those mornings when you get out of bed and your feet are cold when they touch the floor. Of looking outside, of seeing the slightest whisper of snow on the ground, of having the teeniest of flashes thinking....what if? What if?

You're shivering a little -- with cold or optimistic anticipation, who knows? You smell almost-burned toast and go into the kitchen to eat your oatmeal and the radio is on and the announcer is calling out the school closings. They're in alphabetical order, and if you never paid attention to your ABCs, you can bet you do right now.

And then you hear it. Your school. Closed. All. Day. Long. You run into the living room and the good news is confirmed at the bottom of the TV screen.

You call your friend two doors down and you meet outside. You're freezing, but laughing like hyenas and trying to gather enough snow in your wet mittens to make a snowball to push down her turtleneck sweater.

By noon, after you've burned the roof of your mouth gulping Campbell's tomato soup and wolfing down a grilled-cheese sandwich, you rush back outside. There's still hardly any accumulation. Still, the snow falls.

And still, you snatch it up, practically as it drops from the sky, determined to build a snowman. One that wobbles on the brown grass, one that will be gone by the time school would be let out.

But there is no school. Today's a snow day.