Let It Snow!

It has been forty-plus years since I’ve walked the halls of my neighborhood high school and I still get a thrill out of hearing the snow report school closings. My husband doesn’t understand my thinking. I don’t work in a school and I no longer have any school age children living at home. I am a bookkeeper who finds my own clients. I make my own hours and can reschedule a job any day of the week to give myself a day off. Yet, I get excited when a fierce snowstorm shuts everything down.

There is an electrical charge in the air right before a snowstorm. Total strangers will strike up a conversation about the impending storm. People are united in their fear and anticipation. Excitement builds throughout the day before a storm, when people at work start talking about the predicted snow accumulations and asking, I wonder if it will be bad enough to give us a day off? I get pulled into the frenzy with them and express my hopes for a snow day off, even though I know I will be postponing any job I have for the next day if I awaken to see just one flake of white stuff in the street.

Everyone you speak to, from the street vendor to the sales clerk, ends the conversation with an enthusiastic, “good luck tomorrow!” I call my husband at work and tell him we must go grocery shopping after dinner to prepare for the storm and he reminds me of the freezer I have in my garage that is already full of loaves of bread, home made cookies, cooked soups, tomato sauce, meatballs and other frozen leftovers that I squirrel away for nights when I come home late.

“But you are almost out of milk!” I tell him, my voice edging on panic. “Let’s at least get you some milk and toilet paper; just the necessities, in case we can’t get out for a few days.”

We always split up in the grocery store: two wagons, two lists. I make up both the lists and I put him on the cold cuts line, to buy me some extra time to read package labels and pick out the best fruit. I tell him to buy anything he thinks we might need, even if it isn’t on the list, because, normally, he will put nothing in his wagon that isn’t on his list.

When we are finished shopping my wagon is spilling over and he has the original six items on his list, plus one bag of potato chips. My wagon has M & M candies, Devil Dogs, bags of flour and sugar for baking cookies in the storm, some butter cookies - in case the lights go out and I can’t bake cookies in the storm.

The total comes to $243… just the necessities for two people in a snow storm.