My earliest visual memory is a snow taller than I am that blocks out the windows. Dark and ominous, it crowds out the sky. It's not the puffy white stuff that southern children know for a fleeting few minutes some winters. It's actually the winter of 1951 in Lafayette, Indiana, where my dad is a grad student and my mother survives in a converted Quonset hut with two kids under four.
Years later I realiz
ed that at nearly four I was pretty short and the snow on the Indiana plains that had drifted against our windows was probably only two feet deep, but from my vantage point seemed like a smothering wall of gray. Freud would probably say that's the source of my dislike for snow, and maybe he would be right.Unless you live on a deserted tropical island (and good for you!) without TV, you know that the east coast is being hammered by a freaky winter storm. It looks like 8 - 10 inches on the porch railings, but the weather-guessers are predicting an additional 4 inches this afternoon. It's beautiful in a way, but has that smothering feeling that I remember from childhood.
I think southerners appreciate snow better when we get two quick inches that
last until lunchtime, and then we can go back to normal life. This is not that snow. It will be a couple of days before a plow reaches the nearby main street and we will have to clear our own path to it. This is over-exertion, heart attack snow! This is definitely stay inside snow - altho the neighborhood kids will probably be out at first light to begin enjoying it!On a brighter side, it will our first white Christmas in 40 years or more. (At that rate, it can also be my last!) Today will be the perfect day for baking cookies and maybe even bread. No shopping, no hurrying around. Just a snuggle-down day with the fire, a good book, and the man I love. What do you think about that, Freud?
I love that you found the positive! Personally I love being snowed-in as well!
ReplyDeleteCharlene, I'm taking your advice. Tomorrow I will buy a special book to keep ideas in and am returning to this blog. I miss it too much. Still no real focus for the near term, but I think writing things down may help with finding a better focus. Thanks for the encouragement.
ReplyDeleteWell, I don't know about Freud, but I do know that your idea of how to spend a snowed-in day exactly matches mine. I tend to shut myself in the kitchen with the fairy lights a-twinkling and make soup, or cakes. Then the afternoon in the snuggly sitting room, open fireplace, my best friend who is also my husband (how lucky is that?) and a good book. Supplied with cake and tea half way through... my cup runneth over. Though not literally of course. Thanks for popping by.. don't know who you are but it lifts my day to see a new name commenting on my blog over at pfgs.blogspot.com
ReplyDeleteMerry Christmas to you too....
PS I love to garden too.
Yes, I think we have a lot in common - except continent, of course!!
ReplyDelete