Bonus Days

During my freshman year of college, I waited nearly a full day longer than almost everyone else on campus before I began my 11-hour drive home; four of us were driving two cars and had agreed to travel together, and two of the girls had late finals that meant I had to wait until the next day. Despondent, I called my grandmother to vent about my loneliness and boredom as my dorm emptied. She offered a different perspective.

"Just think, though, hon," she said. "You're already packed, you're done with finals, and you have the day all to yourself. I call days like that 'bonus days.' You have this gift of time to do something you really enjoy."

As tempting as it was to sulk, or feel that I was missing a day of my Christmas break, I remember it fondly all these years later. I rarely had my dorm room to myself, but my roommate had left early. I basked in the quiet, stretched out on my bunk bed, and spent the entire day reading a book. I even remember the book; it was Madeleine L'Engle's A Live Coal in the Sea, and I read it cover to cover that day.

***

I've been anticipating snow since last weekend, when the forecast predicted snow all this week starting on Sunday night. Sunday night produced nary a single snowflake at my house, and we didn't have as much as a late start. I woke up every hour all night long to peer out the window, waking for good at four o'clock on Monday morning. I was grumpy and tired and disappointed. This Montana girl loves the romance of a snow day, since we didn't get them growing up. It's easy to romanticize snow when you don't have to shovel it well into March and April, and it is precious to me now.

(And I know I've written this before, but if you live in a place accustomed to snow, kindly keep your snarky comments to yourself. Driving on ice out here, where we have steep hills everywhere, is so much harder than driving on snow and ice in any other place I've lived. I'm far more comfortable driving in heavy snow in Montana or Minnesota than I am driving in just a little here. When it snows here, we have ice, the roads are terrible, we don't have the infrastructure to handle it, and we stay home, thank you very much.)

On Monday afternoon, I decided to clean my kitchen to cope with my disappointment. Not ordinary cleaning, like wiping down the counters and making sure all the dishes were put away, but the kind of cleaning that involved emptying every single cupboard and cabinet and scrubbing the inside, and then scrubbing the outsides as well. I washed the silverware tray. I cleaned the junk drawer. I watched a movie (The Fugitive with Harrison Ford from 1993, because I picked it up at Easy Street Records for like three bucks and I love it, shut up) and an episode or two of Friday Night Lights, and somewhere in there I managed to cook West Indian red beans with coconut rice.

I made Matt admire the silverware drawer more than is normal. He's a good sport. But later he said, "You...do this sort of thing. When you're sleep deprived."

The first flakes fell just after eight o'clock last night and hope surged again.

"It's not going to snow," Isaac grumped. We'd been so disappointed that morning. "It's not going to stick. It doesn't even matter."

But hope is a killing thing, and it kept me up all night again. It was nothing like the beautiful fluffy flakes of last February, but before I went to sleep we had enough to coat the grass, our patio furniture, and the swing set with a thin, glistening layer of snow.

I didn't sleep well until the first call came at 3:38 this morning alerting us to a two-hour delay; the call announcing that schools were closed followed at shortly before six o'clock. We managed to keep the kids inside until first light, at which point they donned snow gear and headed outside to make the best of it. We have enough lawn to support quite a few snowballs, even if the snow isn't thick.

I stayed in bed as long as I could, listening to the kids and their early-morning restlessness. Matt and I cuddled sleepily for awhile.

"I'm going to clean out the dining hutch this morning," I said against his chest. He laughed and laughed.

I know we have to make up the day, that we now have a three-day weekend instead of a four-day weekend over President's Day. I know my colleagues were hoping for a two-hour delay -- all the benefits of sleeping in without the penalty of making up the time. But listen: today was perfect. Reader, I cleaned my dining hutch. I dusted my house, and then I scrubbed the bathrooms and vacuumed and mopped floors and found other random dusty corners to clean. I made tomato soup and grilled cheese with The Good Bread Matt thought to buy for me. We all had hot chocolate. I had the coziest, most delicious nap, the best sleep I've had in days. I finished one book and started another. Isaac and I worked together building the model Space Needle I bought him on our Day Out together, our trip to Seattle Center and lunch at the top of the Space Needle, his belated birthday gift over winter break. I snuggled with our daughter on the couch.

It was a Bonus Day in every sense of the word.

We're returning to normal this evening: Tae Kwon Do classes and trumpet practice. But the coziness lingers. Isaac ate his bowl of roasted vegetable curry and said, "Supper's really good, Mom." I'm not evening opening my school planner. The dishwasher hums. I've had a perfect day cozily together with my favorite people. I know I have to make it up, but every single moment is worth it.