Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow!

Last Year's Big Snow

I really LOVE snow.  I love the fat, frozen clouds stretching from one horizon to the next. I adore feeling the temperature continually drop throughout the day and knowing it will allow the snow to stick to the ground later on. I appreciate the hushed silence of snow as well as its noise. I enjoy hearing it crunch under my feet,  and the sound a snowball makes when it smacks its target dead center. I am amazed at how good snowflakes taste melting on my tongue.  In sum, snow totally rocks! 


I can understand how some people who live in an area where snow dominates the winter months may hold a different opinion, but living in a high mountain desert, snow occurs infrequently enough to be a cherished rarity.  Today the clouds hang low in the sky, quite heavy and gray, indicating a sincere possibility that the first snowfall of the season might occur sometime tonight.  I eagerly await the white flakes, floating softly in the air, gently laying themselves down on the frozen ground.  I especially love the accumulation of snow, the excited peeping out the windows to make sure that it still falls and gathers.  As a child growing up first in Arizona and later South Carolina, snow rarely ever happened, and when it did it consisted of the anemic, fast-melting kind.  You know what I am talking about...a weak 1 inch of snow that has more grass and dirt in it than actual ice holding it together.  


 At the age of fourteen, I moved to Capitan, New Mexico and experienced real snowfall for the first time--the kind of snow that comes to your knees and hides your little dogs.  The first snow of that first year blew me away...three entire feet of pure, white loveliness.  I can remember spending the entire day outside, building snowforts with my sister and good friend.  We froze completely and would only come in when forced to by my mother or lured by her homemade cocoa and buttered toast.  That day will live in my memory forever as one of the best days I've ever experienced, partly because of the snow, but mostly because I got to share it with the people I loved.


In the past twenty four years, there have been many snowfalls which I recall vividly.  I remember walking two miles in a snowstorm to a friend's place to go sledding down the huge hill behind her house and getting stuck there because it continued to accumulate.  I also remember a time when my brother-in-law got trapped my folks' house by four feet of snow and tried digging out his car by hand just to get away from my mother.  Sadly he failed and had to spend yet one more night under her disapproving glare.  Another snowfall occurred at Easter one year, when we were visiting my parents.  We had dressed for spring and had no winter clothes with us for ourselves or our children, so we made do with what we had and spent the day outside in an assortment of odd clothing, playing in the snow.  My sister's kids and my daughter ran inside to their grandma after a few minutes for cocoa and toast and she and I stayed outside for hours sledding.  I remember a little girl across the way saw us and hollered, "Go ask your momma if you can come and play."  That just tickled me something fierce.  It's a great memory to hold onto.


Last year we had one of the biggest and coldest snowfalls ever to hit Alamogordo.  Everything virtually came to a standstill.  The district closed the schools, people stayed home from work, and for a few days, silence engulfed the town.  At my own cozy abode, a roaring fire in the fireplace, homemade chicken soup, the cocoa and toast I now make for my own kids, ruled the week.  We bundled up, went outside and built snowmen, walked around the neighborhood until we couldn't feel our feet, and had some serious snow ball fights with each other.  I didn't care about the tracked in mud and snow, or the fact that we couldn't go anywhere for a few days.  I just loved being able to share an experience like that with my children and my husband ( a dyed-in-the-wool snow hater from Sweden). My sister and her boys came over and we had a blast that week.  


So, I am eagerly looking forward to having it snow tonight.  I am ready to have fun with it, to make more memories of it and family mixed together.  I want to put on my obnoxious Christmas music, get the decorations out, roast marshmallows by the fire and wait to go play in it tomorrow.  Here's to hoping it happens....

Grandpa's Backyard

Awakening to a brightness, unusual to this South Carolina girl,

I saw not the butter yellow of autumn sun,

but stark white.

Through the window,

where green nature had been

frosty flakes blanketed the world.

Sister and I, full of excitement

hastily grabbed socks, shoes, mittens and hats 

and wrapped in our robes, we went outside.

So afraid that if were didn't hurry

it would melt like an early morning dream.

We only abandoned the smiling snowmen and arctic forts

when Momma tempted us

with hot cocoa and buttered toast.

That night, I softly said a prayer

that tomorrow I could still enter

this new world, 

brilliant with prism crystals of color

brilliant with color's absence.

Tomorrow, a few hours out the window,

called me in a midnight creep to peep

and ensure that the treasure 

still lived

in Grandpa's backyard.