Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

Oh the weather outside is frightful....but not snowy. We're completedly surrounded on all sides but one by water, and sit at sea level on the Mid-Atlantic Coast. While it seems that the entire country is getting buried in piles of white, beautifying the dead landscapes in a quiet fluffy blanket, we are getting more rain and wind to flood the flood warning areas. Again, I am thankful that the major selling point of our house was that it sits in the middle of the high and dry zone of the tidal flood maps. But being former Miss New England, this no snow business is depressing. I have serious longing for snow, like I lost the love of my life.

3.1.2009, the one snow we've had in three winters here.

I love snow. I miss the bones of the earth and trees covered in a glistening, twinkling white. I love seeing the squirrels zip around and fluff their tails on the branches of empty trees, just laid over in winter white - a lady dressed for a holiday ball wearing a wrap over a sparkly dress. The comforting quiet of a dawn rising, muffled after an overnight snowfall. The way the whole word glows in shades of blue on a crisp night. My favorite playing with my kids is in the snow: the angels, the snowball warfare, the building of forts and castles and snow men and women. I even enjoyed the shoveling the car out or the walk depending upon my urban or suburban living arrangements. I grew up with the neighborhood sled hill as my backyard and we regularly went with a big group of families up to Vermont to ski. Snow just makes me giddy and lights me up.



When I lived my whole life in New England, every year on my birthday, it snowed. Sometimes it was a lot, a solid dumping, other times barely a flake. But each year, I felt it was my special present from the Great Spirit that yes, I should celebrate the day I arrived, that my life goes on. I guess people who are born in other seasons and other climates must find their special gift in a sunny sunny day of summer, a raining bloom filled promise of spring, or a bright leaf of Fall. I've begun to watch for snow reports in New England on my birthday, just to be sure that yes, it is snowing once again, just for me. Even if it can't where I live now, the beautiful hills and trees of Connecticut and Massachusetts still get a pretty dusting, and old Commonwealth Ave is blanketed in quiet over it's majestic trees and Victorian architecture in the city I love.



I know that all the lush and stark beauty of snow is temporal, and becomes muck and mud and sleet and freezing rain almost as soon as it comes, but that's exactly the reason I love it so much. It's beautiful and surprising, yes. It's also fleeting. Just like the blooms of spring, the bright hues of fall, the lazy heat of summer and the light in the sky shifting at sunrise and sunset and all day and night long.



I've never seen the same sky twice. Nor the same snow. I just wish I saw more of it here.



In the time since I started this post, I paused to give Baby C a bath, and by the time I returned to my desk to continue, that old song line I opened with is no longer applicable. The sun has broken through, the sky is blue, and now I may be able to at least go put the gardening tools away that I left out days ago, anticipating an attempt to finish putting to bed my plots which I should have finished last month.



It is 58 degrees Farenheit outside, and I should appreciate that here it is near mid-December, and I can go outside without gloves, hat, scarf and boots. I was never very fond of the cold.



But Christmas just isn't in the air for me without a nip in air to nibble my nose and a layer of white coating the ground and everything else.



My apologies to the Southern Hemisphere. You'll get yours in six months.