Snow has a way of making poets of us all, it imprints us so, when we are young.
As I watch the the birds huddling around their feeders, piled high with extra food, replenished for them late yesterday, my thoughts wander back to the monumental snowfalls of my elementary and high school years, while growing up in eastern Pennsylvania. It wasn’t unusual then that schools would close for two or even three days, the district was so vast. Open fields and farmland were like carnival grounds for the elements. The drifting snow was such that buses never left the grounds.
I would stay up late, watching the snow fall, from my bedroom, in the fervent hope that there would be enough accumulation that I wouldn’t have to be up and out the door in a few hours. Homeroom began at 7:15, and by high school I had given up on the drama of taking the bus, opting instead to walk the five miles (by car), which I was able to shave by taking a shortcut through the woods. I lay there for a long while listening to the sounds of chains on tires, as plows and repurposed garbage trucks made their rounds.
Of course, in the morning I would be up anyway, listening with my mother and sister for the closings. Once school was officially cancelled, I embarked, with a stomach full of Cream of Wheat, on a long day of shoveling, sledding, and snowball fights. I’d stagger back home, half-frozen, at midday, with blue spots flashing before my eyes and snow caked to my socks, to regroup over toasted cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, lovingly served up by Mom.
Then I’d be out the door again until suppertime. In the evening, the snow cast a wondrous luminosity, which continued uncannily into the night. By then, friends who lived at respectable distances would have found their way to one another’s houses. The pelting of snowplows ensued.
There were no snow blowers back then. Only eerie silence, punctuated by the distant squeal of children, perhaps the scrape of a shovel, or an occasional spinning tire. After a good snow there would be such embankments, you would have thought we were living in Lillehammer. All very conducive to the construction of ice fortresses, which we connected through a network of passageways.
How many years has it been since I’ve barreled down a nearly-vertical plane on a sled? Lain with my back against the snow? Walked in the woods and experienced a fairy world transformation?
So much laughter, adventure, and romance in those days. Where are the snows of yesteryear?
