SNOW DAY

Yesterday it snowed. I live on the 29th floor of my building on the West side of Manhattan. The view from the floor-to-ceiling windows of our condo brought to mind a snow globe. White snowflakes swirling in a sea of white. My husband and I cozy inside. Me congratulating myself for having had the forethought (and a husband who helpfully suggested it after seeing the forecast) to do the grocery shopping the day before rather than on Saturday as planned. We stayed in all day.

Looking at the frozen tundra outside now, I am thinking about snow days past. The first snow I ever saw was the one time it snowed in Woodside, California, where I grew up. I must have been ten or eleven. There wasn’t enough snow on the ground to make a snowball much less build a snowman, but my siblings and I had fun while it lasted, running around in the falling snow, shouting “It’s snowing! It’s snowing!”

There were also family trips to the Sierra Nevada mountains in winter when I was a child. Several photos in our family album show us kids in rubber boots, hooded jackets, and mittens against a backdrop of towering snow mounds. I remember thinking the best thing ever was playing in the snow until my fingers and toes turned to Popsicles. This was back when I was short enough that I didn’t have far to fall when I slipped and fell. (These days, I see an icy sidewalk and think “broken hip.”)

When I lived in British Columbia in my early twenties, I saw plenty of snow in winter. I learned to ski. I enjoyed views in winter from my country cottage of the landscape covered in pristine snow marked only with animal tracks.

Then there was the year it snowed the day I went into labor with my firstborn. A real snowstorm! The road I lived on was unplowed, our vehicle was buried under snow in the driveway. I remember trudging from our house to the main road through a foot of snow, while I was having labor pains, where I got a ride to the hospital. Somehow I made it there in time so I didn’t have to give birth in the backseat of a car.

Snow days are like certain smells. They bring back memories. The first time you caught a snowflake on your tongue. The snowmen you’ve built and hills you’ve sled down through the years. The white Christmases of your youth. The snowball fights when you were a kid. What I’ll remember from yesterday’s snowstorm is snuggling on the sofa with my husband that evening, eating popcorn and watching The Palm Beach Story while the world outside was covered in white.