... About Snow

Somewhere, buried deep in one of my family photo albums, is a picture of Maren and me when we were about seven and five years old, respectively. Knowing my mom, she probably took the picture not so much out of maternal pride, but because she wanted to look back at it and laugh at us years later. We're all bundled up in our mittens and hats, our little faces flushed red from cold and hard work. We're glowing with pride as we stand next to the fruits of our labors - a beautifully lumpy and mis-shapen little snowman. Let's call him Mack. He's only about eighteen inches high, but we probably used every snowflake we could find in the yard to build little Mack.

What a thing we had accomplished! We had made a little man out of snow! Or at least we made a mostly vertical pile of snow out of snow. All we needed was some magic in an old silk had we'd found, and life would be golden. Little Mack would prance around our ankles and we'd have wonderful miniature adventures until he melted, but we would know that he'd be back next year. Our little hearts would glow warmly with the antcipation of seeing him again.

Snow was such a rare and fleeting thing when I was growing up. It was never more than an inch thick, and rarely lasted more than a day. I remember going outside to have snowball fights that only lasted five or so minutes before we ran out of ammunition. There was a huge snowstorm in Utah one year, and I remember my grandpa sending us a photo of the massive pile of pristine white that covered his driveway. When we moved to Utah in November of 1994, I expected to see snow like that regularly. In my mind, winters here were like something out of a Rankin Bass movie, complete with a claymation Fred Astaire mailman.

Then I stepped off the plane, and guess what? NO SNOW. At least not pretty snow. There might have been some of that old grey stuff shoved in the gutters, I don't really remember. What the heck? Where's the sparkly white snowdrifts? The children ice-skating on ponds? The life-size snowmen with carrot noses and rosy dispositions? Where's bloody Fred Astaire?!?!

In thirteen years, I have rarely seen "snow" worthy of the name. It snowed yesterday, but it wasn't pretty fluffy Rankin Bass snow. It was wet and gloppy and slippery. I had to buy new shoes so I wouldn't fall down walking up the hill on campus. I hate scraping my car windows, I hate that the salt on the sidewalks stains my jeans, and I hate how that huge glop of heavy wet snow on a treebranch always waits until the precise moment you are walking under the tree to fall. Every time!

And yet, for some reason, every time it snows I get a little twitterpaited. A part of me still hopes, still yearns for that perfect soft frozen blanket of joy. Even though snow has disappointed me time and time again, and even though I find it hard to like it sometimes, I still love the idea of snow. I'm still genuinely excited whenever winter finally rolls around.

So yesterday's snowstorm was a bust, but it's supposed to snow again tomorrow. Maybe this time, just maybe, it will be the perfect Rankin Bass kind of snow. I'll wake up to find Fred Astaire in my front yard, adding the finishing magic touches to little Mack. Then the three of us will trot off, hand-in-hand, and find a perfect little pond where we can spend the day ice skating. We'll have a race, and Fred will win, but only because he cheats. Then we'll get hot cocoa, which will make little Mack melt away, but we'll have a chuckle about it because it's okay; we know he'll be back next year.

Oh, please, snow! Don't disappoint me!