Snow Storms

The snow storm last week got me to thinking about things that were special when I was  a kid that aren’t so great now that I’m grown up (or as close as I’m ever going to get to it, anyway.)  Christmas springs to mind immediately, of course; toys and Santa and Grandmother’s house when we were kids, expensive shopping now, although having all the kids home for Sheila’s Christmas Dinner is pretty awesome.   Birthdays are another; cake and presents and another year closer to being able to drive then, cake and presents and another year closer to not being able to drive now.  Snow storms are a third one.

Snow storms, now that I’m older, are mostly a pain in the butt.  I can remember each major snow storm of my adult life by something crummy that happened.  I wrecked the grill of my ’66 Malibu in a storm when a guy stopped in front of me on an access ramp to I-40 and I couldn’t get stopped.  It was one of those slow motion things where it seemed like I had hours to get stopped or to jump the curbs and miss him, but I couldn’t make it happen.  After I was married, I was driving my wife’s Torino to work so that she and the kids would have a car with a working heater to get around in and I ran it off the road when the windshield iced over in a blizzard.  It took my entire Christmas bonus check to get it towed and get the heater fixed.  The inlaws were wonderful and saved Christmas for the kids that year.  A few years ago I got every vehicle I owned stuck in the ditch in front of my house.  A Samaritan with a front-end loader pulled them all out.  This last storm I was sick and slept through most of it.

But as a kid–as a kid, snow storms were magic.   I moved from north Texas to the panhandle when I was 8 and a few months later saw my first real blizzard.  We didn’t have school, which was pretty magical all by itself, and my sisters and I spent the day with some of the neighborhood kids building snow forts and snow men and having snowball fights, stuff I’d only read about before that.  In junior high my friend Kerry and I hiked out to the local lake and spent the day riding broken down cardboard boxes down the hills.  We built a fire and melted snow in a Boy Scout Cook Kit to make hot chocolate because Kerry was the kind of guy that always seemed to have that kind of stuff with him.  After another blizzard when I was in high school I went with my dad to check cattle and we rode across a wonderland pasture at sunrise, clear sky above, nothing but white for as far as you could see, no sound but the creaking of the saddles and snorting of the horses and for a few moments the world was perfect.  Then the mare my dad was riding found where the cows had knocked down the hot fence during the blizzard and the perfect morning exploded into legend.  She hit the ground with a loud “chuff,” Dad rolled free and the mare scrambled to her feet and bucked off into a wide circle in the snow, squealing and farting with each kick, stirrups slapping her in the ribs with each landing, and Dad hustling after her.  She made the turn and here they came back, Dad in the lead now, with the mare close behind, my horse and I both slack-jawed at the display.  Dad finally got the mare calmed and I quit laughing and we went about our business.  It beat the heck out of chemistry class.