That was the headline of our newspaper today. It was similar to the crawl on the local TV station last evening, a town followed by "canceled." Fisher--canceled. Tolono--canceled. There were so many cancellations, school district names and numbers were eliminated, but it read like the nuclear holocaust had occurred and towns had disintegrated.
I thought of all of the children who were whooping it up at home, knowing that they had a free day. I loved snow days as a child, but I admit that I loved them even more as a teacher. I savored that unscheduled time and most often used to it read--as a child, a teacher, even now. Sometimes, my mother treated me to snow ice cream. It tasted as good to me then as gelato tastes now, and the occasional black speck didn't bother me a bit. I owned a sled, but I lived where it was too flat to use until my high school years, when a sledding hill was finally constructed. Mostly everyone stayed inside when we had big snows--no neighborhood snowball fights or massive snowmen. We turned into hibernating bears.
Truthfully, I was terribly disappointed by the "winter storm" that showed up here. I wanted the snow to fall at a rate of 2" an hour, bury the bushes, and render the landscape pristine. Instead, we listened to the wildness of the wind and the fury of sleet most of the day and evening on the first of February. We might have received 4-6 inches of snow, but it was tainted by the ice and very difficult to remove today. Blessedly a neighbor snow blows our driveway, and we only have to cope with clearing the entry and a dog path out back.
The fire is calling me, and I only have forty pages left in my book. Time to return to my chair and languish in the beauty of the author's words.
I'll return to blogging about our cruise tomorrow. (We were actually gone from January 14-23.) Those 80 degree days seem far off!
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