Snow Days

When we were younger, snow days meant wearing your pajamas inside out the night before (or rather, wearing your pajamas the night before meant a snow day). They meant hoping you’d wake up in the morning to the sound of your mom calling to you from outside your door, “No school today!” We would try and count the number of inches of snow on the ground, hoping it was enough, because snow days meant dragging your sled out to the neighborhood hill with your brother or your friends, complaining about the trudge uphill, and giving yourself a running start so you could ride down at maximum speed - backwards, forwards, on your belly. Those few thrilling seconds of icy wind in your face somehow made climbing back up that big hill for the seventh (and eighth and ninth) time worth it. Lots of snow meant testing whether it was really possible to build an igloo, and if that would suffice as a fort good enough to carry you to victory in a snowball fight. Snow days meant, “I dare you to eat that snow.” Snow days meant hoping and digging for the last wrinkly carrot in your fridge, licking the cream from an Oreo and using the two cookies for eyes, and sacrificing your own hat and scarf for Frosty’s sake. Snow days meant snuggling under your warm blankets that night with your pajamas still inside out, and hoping, praying, on some off-chance, that tomorrow morning might bring more snow and yet another snow day.

Quite obviously, I’m still a teenager in high school, and we still get snow days. But today I count the inches of snow because the less there are, the less I have to shovel, the less I have to scrape off the car. I pray for snow days, not because I’m excited to go sledding or build a snowman, but because I am genuinely not sure how I am going to get through the week without being able to catch a break. Indeed, they are desperately-needed breaks from the constant pressure of work, work, work, sleep, repeat. Even so, they have become days filled with dreaded homework and futile attempts at breaking my terrible habits of sleep deprivation. It’s funny how your changing perspective on something as mundane as a snow day can show how much you have changed, for better or worse. Looking back, I long for the days when we had the guard of youthful innocence to protect us from seasonal depression and the vicious choke hold of junior year.

Even now, I am not so naive to forget that I’m still at the peak of youthfulness. I guess all I’m trying to say is that we should appreciate our carefree innocence before it disappears completely and we haven’t even realized it; that we should appreciate life’s simpler moments - however fleeting - unweighted by heavy realities. Maybe the next time we have a snow day, it would be fun to go sledding down that hill one more time.

So what do snow days mean to you?