Let It Snow

We’ve gotten a lot of snow this winter here in the Northeast. The way people have been talking, you’d think we’ve been getting two to three storms per week, though if I really think back, that has happened only a couple of times. People I know, and even some I don’t know, have complained to me about the snow. It seems that a lot of people are sick and tired of the snow.

We haven’t really gotten that much snow the last couple of winters so maybe people are out of practice when it comes to winter, but come on, we live in the Northeast and it’s winter! It’s going to snow and it’s not always going to be at a convenient time. I get it to a certain point; you have to clear the walkway and the driveway, you have to clean off the cars, and then you have to drive to or from work in a snowy mess. It’s not all fun and games as an adult like it was when we were kids.

It seems to me that we used to get more snow when I was growing up than we do now. I don’t remember many winters where there wasn’t a decent amount of snow or when we weren’t able to be skating on the ponds. That was just part of growing up – or was it? I looked back and found a website that listed the annual snowfall in Boston, MA by month. Covering the years from when I can actually remember things up through high school, this is what I found:

 Season       Total (inches)

1966-67         60.1

1967-68         44.8

1968-69         53.8

1969-70         48.8

1970-71         57.3

1971-72         47.5

1972-73         10.3

1973-74         36.9

1974-75         27.6

1975-76         46.6

1976-77         58.5

1977-78         85.1

1978-79         27.5

Throw out 1972-73 as an outlier (what happened that year?) and 1977-78 (“The Blizzard of 1978” skewed those numbers) and we’ve averaged 46.3 inches per season. This season we’ve gotten 42 inches, so I’d say we’re pretty much average this year. Maybe some whiners around here need to get out and do some fun stuff in the snow instead of cursing their very life for living where it snows. Maybe the adults need to go back to their childhood and have some fun.

Winter didn’t stop us from going outside and having fun when we were growing up. We went skating, we went sledding, and we built snow forts and had snowball fights. We played Alaska, a game where we pretended we were in Alaska, caught in some huge blizzard, and we had to rescue someone. We made noises that we thought sounded like the wind, we threw snow up in the air to make it be like it was snowing out of control. We pretended we were rolling down the side of a mountain or, gasp, falling over the side of a cliff! Lucky for us, we had our buddies with us to keep us from plunging to our deaths.

We didn’t complain about the snow, that’s for sure. The more the better as far as we were concerned. It gave us more choices of what to do. And that’s what it comes down to for all the people who’ve been whining about the snow – choice. You can choose to see the negative (clearing the driveway, cleaning off the cars, driving in the snow) or you can choose to see the positive (the beauty of the bushes, trees, and lawns coated in white, sledding, skiing). I’m choosing to let my inner (winter) child enjoy the snow.   

Finding Nemo

As we continue to dig out from Nemo here in the Northeast, I’m looking outside at a nice sunny day and the temperature in the 40’s. It always amazes me to see what a difference a couple of days can make. We had snow from early Friday morning until the middle of the day on Saturday, with plenty of wind to go along with it. When I finally got out and about, there was over two feet of snow, lots of fallen trees and tree limbs, and roads that were half as wide as they should be.

When the flakes finally stopped falling, my son, my wife and I went out to clear the driveway and dig out the cars, which you could barely even see. The snow was up to my mid-thighs in some places where it drifted and we had to go out the cellar door that’s covered by a deck because the front and side doors had so much snow against them we couldn’t open them. Fortunately, I have a snow blower. Unfortunately, since the snow was so deep it sputtered and choked and almost didn’t make it. It took us a little over two hours to get the driveway cleaned and the cars unburied. By the time we headed in, our faces were so frozen it was hard to complete simple sentences.

I’m not complaining. Last week just happened to be the 35^th anniversary of the notorious Blizzard of 1978, and though we didn’t get that much more snow than Nemo dumped on us, that particular storm was much worse. In the aftermath of the Blizzard of 1978, it took six of us parts of two days to shovel the driveway and clean off the cars. We did have a huge driveway, probably big enough to fit ten cars easily, but we had no snow blower. We went out after breakfast and started shoveling, went in for lunch, and then went back out and shoveled until it was getting dark. For two days! Comparatively speaking, two hours with a snow blower doesn’t seem so bad, even if we were pretty cold.

I remember so many times as a kid when we were outside sledding or having snowball fights and we refused to go inside the house despite being numb from the cold. I think we knew that once we went in, we weren’t coming out again (unless we were playing ice hockey and just went home for lunch – that was different). We’d go in, take off all our wet, snowy clothes and sit in front of the fireplace. I swear that for the first ten minutes I couldn’t even feel the heat from the fire. I could have put my frozen feet right into the fire and not felt the flames, but the smell of flesh mixed with dirty socks might have been lethal to all of us. Mom would make us some hot chocolate and we’d sit there for a while and thaw out. That’s why once you were in, you were in for good. 

It was all about choices at that point. You could sit in front of the cozy fire in some warm, dry clothes, or you could put on your still wet jacket, gloves and hat and go back outside into the cold. Though there were some instances we did go back outside, the decision to just stay put was fairly easy. Warm vs. cold; dry vs. wet. On those days, Swiss Miss Instant Cocoa (with mini marshmallows!) was like drinking liquid Godiva chocolate. There was nothing better. We sipped it slowly, not only because it was hot, but also because we just wanted to make it last.

Though the days of sipping hot chocolate in front of a roaring fire are long gone, snow storms in New England are not. We don’t get as many as we used to, or so it seems, but every once in a while we get whacked upside the head by a blizzard. For me, there’s no sledding, snowball fights or playing in the snow anymore, just a strong desire to be inside where it’s warm and dry.