It’s snowing here — big floofy flakes — and sticking, which is even more exiting! Yes, exciting! My sense of excitement (/wonder) about this (which has, at times, been compared to that of an perpetual 11-year old) is very confusing to Jeff, who is … a Northerner. (Actually, technically speaking he’s a MidWesterner, since he’s from Michigan; however, as far as my admittedly geographically impaired self is concerned anyone who hails from north of the Mason-Dixon is a Northerner, at least until you get to Washington or Oregon, which is West Coast.)

You see, for me snow means:

• the excitment of waking up, not being able to see the ground, but knowing, just from the color of the sky, that it had snowed
• listening to the school cancellations on my old alarm clock radio (the sort that had the big numbers that FLIPed over as the minutes changed and an alarm that sounded like a huge duck blowing its nose)
• a day off from school (“snow day” — yah! — the fact that we might have to make it up later in the year just didn’t factor into our joy)
• tomato soup (Campbell’s, always with milk instead of water… why would they even put water in the instructions printed on the can… ICK!) and cheese toast
• hot cocoa (yes, miniature marshmallows!)
• getting to stay in pajamas until it was time to go play in snow:

• pitiful (usually not much snow around here), yet proud, snow people (in fact, one year we made a snow dragon!). I still remember the apron we used to put on our snow woman, a light blue ties-around-the-waist sort with darker blue flowers.
• snowball fights with all the neighborhood kids (I was exceptionally lucky to grow up in a “real” neighborhood, with probably 25 kids who were within 5 years of me in age)
• sledding, though not on sleds with runners, as they’d certainly sink, but on either “flying saucers” or these sheets of rectangular plastic which would roll up when you weren’t sitting on them). We had a good (long and steep) hill growing up (the name of our street was Stonehill St.) so when it snowed the whole neighborhood would be out on the big hill.
• then coming inside to dry out by the fire (with more cocoa and soup -)And even though I can now work from home (so a “snow day” doesn’t mean a “no work day” ) and even though I haven’t got a sled (or a proper hill, for that matter), I still do have hot cocoa and tomato soup and cheese toast and a “snow day” is still a cause for celebration.

  (And I didn’t even get into the strange southern ritual of filling the car with gas and buying every single loaf of bread, carton of eggs and gallon of milk in the grocery store in one crazed, mad rush…)