"Snowdays" (A short essay for a January afternoon) -- Burncoat High School, Class of 1978, Message Board

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Date Posted: 12:10:05 01/06/05 Thu
Author: -Steve Fisk
Subject: "Snowdays" (A short essay for a January afternoon)

So today I am home sick from work.

Good day for it. I've been fighting a cold for a few days now, and it seems to have gotten the better of me. What I needed was to just stay home and daydream. A greatly undervalued thing if you ask me- daydreaming. And besides, it's been snowing like crazy all morning. (A pair of great excuses that beat a full house any day of the week. ;-)

So here I am, sitting at my computer table, watching the snow come down in the gathering dusk on this January afternoon. I hear the snowplows going by my fairly busy street, and am reminded of something from a long long time ago,.......

{Roll Music}

Thing is, I've been I have been thinking about this all morning and feel compelled today to write about it somehow. It's something which in retrospect was truly wonderful about growing up and going to public school in Central Massachusetts.

"Snowdays". Even the word conjures a primeval response of bliss. ("Snowdays"- one word, not two.)

Simply put, in this part of the world it can snow so much that on a given day, it just wouldn't make sense to have school. The roads are impassible/too slippery/dangerous to go out, blah-blah. So the kids get a holiday out of the blue. Unexpected until the last minute. You thought you were going to be in trouble because you didn't do your homework, but instead, go back to bed if you like- it's a snowday.

The way you found out about it was in the form of something you could almost regard as a song, or the words to some magic spell you came to almost know by heart. It was on the radio in the dim grey morning of a January or February day. Sitting there so quietly so as to not miss the sound. Not daring to breathe.
It was the announcements of the towns that had called school off that day- said in alphabetical order. You knew it was a good sign if first the towns around you had been called off that began with letters lower in the Alphabet than your town.
In our case, "Worcester Public Schools" was almost at the very end- so you had to wait and listen to the whole thing. A beautiful sounding thing indeed. "Auburn Public Schools, all day, no school. Baldwinville Public, no school all day. Berlin Public, no school.... and so on,....."

And when they said your town you could go back to bed. Hah! Joy! Rapture!
Because on top of this we didn't just go back to bed- we went out and rolled around in the snow all day. Until our mothers yelled at us to come in because we were "all soaked and going to catch our deaths of pneumonia". (Except one kid's mother down the street who used to say you would get "ammonia".)

There were snowforts, snowballs, iceballs, slides, sledding, and a whole vocabulary of wonders that kids who live in Arizona know nothing of.

I lived at the top of a hill and a lot of kids would come over and sled down the hill right in the middle of the street. Until old Mr. Wyman who lived at the bottom of the hill would call the City and have the sandtruck come and "sand the street". After that the sledding was abysmal and everyone would go find some other place.

Maybe I grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting and I just don't know it, but,,,,.......

I picture coming in at lunch on a snowday and Mother would always have chicken noodle soup. Seems it happened every time, and it has the feel of a television commercial when I look back on it. Chicken noodle soup from a can and some sort of sandwiches. Always, every time. Along with the smell of our mittens thawing on the radiator while we ate. Ah! And cocoa, always cocoa. (Just what is the difference between "cocoa" and "hot chocolate", anyway?)

Now I have to imagine kids in other parts of the country have no idea what this is like. Or maybe they just have other such emergencies, real or imagined. Maybe in California the kids have earthquakedays or something, I dunno. But I do know we used to have snowdays, and they were something of a gift from God.

But now here I am all grown up. I am a responsible adult and I have bills to pay. I haven't made a snowfort in at least 30 years. (At least one for myself and not for a little kid- that doesn't count.) I don't ever have this luxury of having Life postponed for one day for no compelling reason. Doesn't work that way anymore.

So as I say, today it was snowing and I didn't feel that well. For once it was a good day to call in because I really didn't have that much going on like I usually do. And I gave myself a "snowday" today. Know what I mean?

Have to run. It's been declared a snowday, so I hafta go out to the kitchen and make some cocoa.

Or is it "hot chocolate"? I Dunno.

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