Snow Days

I smell snow in the air.

My husband is out for a late afternoon run as it grows dark. My children are watching the Super Bowl. We don't follow football at all, but my daughter became a fan when the Seahawks won five years ago and she actually enjoys (and understands) it, so every year now, regardless of who's playing, we humor them and buy fun snacks and enjoy the day in our own very low-key way. I'm about to make a big pot of sausage, sweet potato, and kale soup for dinner, because soup sounds good on a night that smells like snow and because my son loves it and asks for seconds. My son has become someone who eats absolutely everything I cook, and yes, we've made and heard all the jokes about how expensive it's going to be to feed this boy as a teenager, but I don't care. I love feeding him. I love watching him eat something that isn't plain pasta or a chicken tender, I love the moment when he announces he likes it, and I love serving up a bowl of seconds.

It isn't snowing yet.

We didn't have snow days growing up in Montana. I remember missing school for a day in elementary school, maybe third or fourth grade, but it wasn't for snow, it was for windchill, much like the Midwest has experienced this month. We lost power, and it was too cold to play outside. We built a fire in the basement fireplace, and I remember, vaguely, feeling excited about that more than actually missing school.

It's not like that where I live now. If snow is in the forecast, I look out the window and up at the sky for hours, mentally planning how I'll adjust my calendar if we have a snow day. Most of my teacher friends hope for a two-hour late start rather than an entire cancelled day, because they don't want to lose our built-in snow day. If we don't lose a day, we get an extra four-day weekend; usually that's Memorial Weekend, but this year our make-up day is next Friday. I figure, either I get a four-day weekend now (we had Friday off to grade between semesters) or I get the four-day weekend for President's Day. I tend not to get too angsty about a day here or a day there. We all have 180 days somewhere.

But I will never not love the romance of a snow day.

During my third year of teaching, Matt and I drove our little Honda Civic all the way from Seattle to Minneapolis -- with stops in Bozeman both directions -- for Christmas. Driving in the winter had never bothered me; I'm a Montana girl who went to college in Minnesota, and if the roads were open, I drove on them. But that trip, a year after we were married, was exhausting. We drove from Washington to Montana, where we stayed for two nights. We drove from Bozeman to Fargo, where we stayed at a cheap hotel next to a bar. Our pug had gotten carsick and vomited in her crate. We tried to clean it with cold paper towels at a rest stop, but I still smelled it all night long. After a short night on an uncomfortable mattress, we pushed on to the Twin Cities. Matt and I both had terrible colds, and we filled up a plastic grocery sack with used tissues as we drove across three states. The drive home was worse. We left Minneapolis at six o'clock in the morning, intending to make it all the way to Bozeman. It's a long drive on a summer day, but we battled blizzards and black ice for over twenty hours and nearly a thousand miles, stopping only for gas and hamburgers with creamy tomato soup at the 4B's in Miles City, Montana. We rested for a day in Bozeman before heading home. Driving through the mountains in whiteout conditions was worse than black ice across North Dakota; we slowed to a crawl over Lookout Pass, our wipers ineffective against the spray of snow from the semi-trucks that barreled past. We thought it would be smooth sailing after Spokane -- at least the interstate was relatively flat after that -- but we gave up at Moses Lake, checking into a motel that would take our dog before slumping into a booth at Denny's. We barely made it out of the parking lot the next morning, but driving was manageable in the daylight. I told Matt I never wanted to make that drive in the winter again, and we haven't.

We turned onto the street to our house shortly before lunchtime, one day after we expected to make it home. Our lawn -- for the very first time since we'd lived in our house -- was coated with a layer of snow. Not quite enough to completely hide the spikes of grass poking through, but enough to make me squeal out loud and turn to my husband and say, "Look!" Snow had become beautiful again.

We had a two-hour late start that first Monday back. It started to snow again that afternoon, and before the end of the school day, the district decided to close for the next day. My very first snow day. I still rose at five o'clock to turn on the television, to see the name of my school district scrolling across the bottom of the screen. That, I think, is a thing we've lost: the excitement of turning on the news in the dark to watch those scrolling names. Now we get texts, e-mail alerts, automatic callouts. It's much more efficient, of course, but romance and efficiency don't mix.

I put on a movie and cleaned our house, even though we hadn't lived in it for two weeks. I dusted, vacuumed, scrubbed the bathrooms. Later that afternoon I went to the Starbucks up the street to grade the junior IB Literature projects I'd neglected in Minnesota. And before dinner, the news announced that schools would be closed again. Two snow days in a row! Magic! I wrote in my journal the next day: All the branches on the bush outside our bedroom window are encased in ice. Each and every spindly little one. When I took Blondie outside the only sounds were the cracking of ice, and snow and slush falling from the heavy tree-tops, bent over and unaccustomed to the extra weight, as loud as rain.

Ten year ago we had three days off leading into winter break. My coworkers complained about making up the extra days. I was miscarrying a baby at nine weeks, bleeding and crying and pretending I was fine as I responded to e-mails from my students who were wondering how to submit the assignments that were due that week. I curled into a blanket, grateful for the respite. I didn't have to pretend to be okay.

There are flurries in the sky. Flakes fall and then it stops for awhile. But I know the smell of snow.

In January of my daughter's kindergarten year, we lost an entire week -- Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and that night they called off school for the following day. It wasn't even snowing yet, not really, but the roads were icy, and while my friends in Montana and Minnesota scoffed at my school district I will say that I would far rather drive in heavy snow in either of those places than in just a little bit of snow or ice on our hills. Snow fell that night and continued for a couple of days before turning to freezing rain. It covered the snow in an icy sheen and bent the trees. The streets glistened under the heavy gray sky.

Anyway, I shouldn't say we lost those days. They had the potential to be sort of terrible, because everyone had colds, and then Isaac's turned into an ear infection and mine turned into a sinus infection. But the forced relaxation was so good for us. It had been one of my most difficult semesters of teaching with two of my most difficult classes -- classes that had me wondering if I'd come to the end of my effectiveness as a teacher. Four days of breathing space gave me the reset I needed. I wore sweats, drank a lot of coffee, read a few books, and watched all five seasons of Friday Night Lights (a Christmas gift from my husband). The kids built a snowman outside and blanket forts inside. I am a person who likes to be able to say, I have done this and this and this; I am a checker of boxes. But it was so good to put it all down for a few days.

I've been writing this for hours now. I keep wandering away to do other things -- to make the soup, to read another chapter in my book. The football game is over and the internet tells me it was a boring one. Snow is falling again now, and the tips of the lawn are white. The district has called a two-hour late start. But it's supposed to snow all night, and I think tomorrow will be a snow day. Matt thinks that because we already know we have a delay, we won't have to worry about waiting for a phone call at five o'clock in the morning, but teachers don't sleep well with the maybe of a snow day. I know I'll wake during the night just to peer out the window, to see if flakes are still falling in the glow of the neighbor's backyard porch light.

Two years ago, in early February, we had two snow days in a row. The first day I read almost all of Swing Time by Zadie Smith while the kids played. On the second day I was restless enough to empty out every kitchen drawer and cabinet and wipe them down while the kids watched Groundhog Day. It was tremendously satisfying.

Snow days are inconvenient. They mean a lot of scrambling to adjust my teaching, and if we have more than one, the days are tacked on in June. But I don't care. These unexpected gifts of time to just be with my family have become a tapestry of memories over the years, and when I think of the blanket forts, the hot chocolate, books read and movies watched, when I think of our kids piling on our bed at six o'clock in the morning begging to go outside, when I see them charge across the unblemished yard in the first gray light of morning, I think, what's an extra day in June?