Snow day echoes many childhoods

Nothing beats a snow day from school. It’s a treasure of unexpected freedom and possibility. At least, that’s the way it was when I was a kid – when there were “wolves in Wales” – and that?s still the way it feels now that I’m a teacher and “The shoe’s on the other foot.”

Yes, classes and meetings will be postponed, the walk must be shoveled, the car plowed out and decaked; a few adult exigencies persist. But today will be paced by nothing but deep snow.

A snow day is an echo of childhood. At the first intimation of a big snow storm, every kid in town would certainly have been sleeping with a transistor radio tucked under their pillow, ready for first light and The Wait: listening to the radio for the school cancellations announcements. “No school in the following communities…” the DJ would intone, and then in a time honored ritual, read down the list of town names. But “No school” is the only big news.

Since we lived in a town beginning with the letter “W,” and the school cancellation list was read in alphabetical order, The Wait was long, torturous and full of delicious anticipation similar to Christmas morning.

My childhood delight in a snow day derived not just from missing school, but from gaining a day of play along with the delivery of a fabulous raw material for that play. By definition, there will be a lot of snow; too much to get to school, but never too much to get out of the house and explore. A snow day is by definition a soaked mitten-and-snow-suit day.

The day’s assignment was automatic. First period: tunneling and burrowing in the drifts, rolling snowmen and tobogganing down Hurley?s Hill, snowballing crusades across the back yards, in and out of snow forts. The plows would rumble down the road with sanding hoppers on their haunches making them look like elephants. They would steeply bank the snow against the fences along the front yard, repeatedly burying the end of the driveway all day long, creating more work for the snow blowers and more opportunity for us snow miners and Eskimos.

I remember one snow day in particular when I lay for hours in my burrow, cocooned in ice, listening to the compressed, polar silence at the bottom of the yard. A snow day is also, by definition, an igloo day.

Tuesday’s snow day could have been lifted from snow days of 30 years ago. For the first few hours of the morning, nothing moves. There is no wind and the snow adheres so thickly branch by branch that the trees seem to be marzipan.

An occasional snow plow growls along scraping the tarmac, its chains jangling like dog tags and its yellow beacon winking in the gloom. Then, slowly, other vehicles appear to make their tentative way down Main Street, snow tires murmuring along in the soft ruts that appear between passes of the plow.

A snow day ends with a rewinding of the clock. Tonight will be last night. Today will be tomorrow, since the day’s plans, suspended by a phone call at 5 a.m. have already been bounced ahead. And the wet mittens, boots and snowsuits are draped over chairs to dry by the wood stove.

Todd R. Nelson is a free-lance writer in Castine.