waiting on the snow
As we sit here waiting for the advent of the winter storm of the year or the winter storm of the decade or the winter storm of the century, whichever one it is, we recognize that meteorology hasn’t changed much. But we have.
Snowstorms used to mean throwing snowballs at each other, building snowmen and maybe — if there was more than a few inches of snowfall — even creating a snow fort. It meant taking out the sled, if you had a sled, or just finding a cardboard box we could open up and use to slide down that big hill over there.
It meant getting your gloves all wet — did we call them mittens? — and drying them on the radiator.
Maybe most important, snowstorms meant no school tomorrow! It meant homework was suddenly optional. Plus, you could have hot chocolate for lunch.
Not so much today.
Snowstorms at some point — maybe when we turned into working, home-owning adults? — became serious.
Today, they mean did you remember to slightly open that outdoor faucet so it would drip a bit and the pipes wouldn’t freeze? They mean wondering if you really, finally should have bought a generator — or are you just going to hope that the power lines hold up?
For some of us, it may mean do we still have to go out and walk the damn dog when the wind chill says it feels like -8?
If we’re still working today, snowstorms mean we’re still working today. We can still have that meeting via Zoom and send those Slack messages and still download those reports from Dropbox or Google Docs. Snowstorms don’t mean a day off.
They do eventually mean shoveling and worrying about will your back or heart give out first and looking in the garage to see if we still have rock salt or kitty litter somewhere.
Have we checked to make sure we have candles and flashlights and extra blankets if needed? And if the power goes out, will our home insurance cover frozen food that gets unfrozen when the freezer warms?
All in all, I’d much rather throw snow balls and drink hot chocolate.