The frost creeps up the windowsill as the thermometer creeps down into the low numbers. Oh, I’m talking the really low numbers; the type of numbers that send a bear running for his cave, anxious for his hibernation. The kind of cold that stabs a pajama clad body and numbs the skin with an icy touch. Oh, it’s cold alright.
You awake, warm in the bed but you can tell it is cold. It is as if the cold is knocking on the blankets, begging to get in. You lie there for a minute, snug in the comfortable covers, until you regain enough consciousness to notice that you never woke up for school this morning.
The hair rises on the back of your neck as the sickening realization occurs. You jolt upright and jump out of bed, immune to the temperature as your adrenaline pumps. You rush frantically from your room, bolting past the window.
But wait… what of this window? You catch it out of the corner of your eye, a discrepancy. Outside is a soft white color and is blanketed in snow clinging perfectly to the earth. Your heart stops racing as relief and wonder shiver through you. You stand there a moment more, frozen in your satisfied exhaustion, until the real cold sets in.
Your bed beckons, chants your name like a tribal summoning as the blankets swallow you once again. You settle in among the covers, still warm from your sleeping body. As the last of the cold is forced from the nest of blankets by your furnace of a body, you settle back into the sleep you so craved.
You can’t tell me you don’t love a snow day then.
What I like most about them is the variability of the experience; each time a snow day rolls around, I enjoy it in an entirely different way. Sometimes I will spend all day out sledding, relishing the stinging cold of the snow thrown in my face by the comical physics of the sled. Other times, I remain inside most of the day, snuggled, fire roaring, enjoying the sleepy comfort of familiar surroundings and the wind pulsing against the window.
Occasionally I will spend the day with friends, bundled goofily in warm clothing, armored against the frigid air and insulated by the vibrating sounds of laughter. Often, however, I will pass the time with my family, reveling in the day’s wonders and thankful for the time to breathe, free from obligations, commitments, and the daily drudgery that inevitably fogs my view of the world and makes it hard to appreciate the little things in the midst of all the scheduled hysteria.
I remember one year, the snow started falling early in the day, drifting to the ground in the small, constant flakes that ensure a big, long snowfall. Late that night I went for a walk and it was still snowing, and the silence was deafening. All that could be heard was the soft sound of snow landing on snow. The street lamps illuminated the shimmering sheen of the smoothed snow as my feet forged a shaky path through new lands like an explorer stumbling through the jungle.
Another year I woke up early and was able to watch the darkness change imperceptibly until suddenly it was quite apparent that the sun had poked its head over the horizon. My yard gleamed, a glittering field of diamonds as the sun’s rays licked hungrily at it and crashed destructively on the snow like a wave rubs the dunes.
It is moments like these that make me remember how beautiful the world can be, and I believe that getting out of school and the typical obligations is the best way to appreciate a snow day, granting time to enjoy it and recuperate from our busy lives.