Winter

The Only Thing a Snow Day Does is Make You Want Another One

But if you do it right, one is enough

It’s Canada, right? If the clichés are true, it is a snow covered socialist paradise for four to six months of the year. The people are of a hardy stock who are used to plowing through and carrying on like it’s all just part of it. In most of the country, things would have to get really bad for a Snow Day to be declared.

But over on the West Coast, in Vancouver, we are a bit more delicate. When it does snow once or twice a year, everything shuts down and the world stops for a day or two.

If you tune into the 6 o’clock news that night, you will see scenes reminiscent of the last winter storm and the one before that too: cars without snow tires trying to go up a hill and sliding back down like Sysiphus. Busses sideways, blocking streets. Tales of people having to spend the night in their vehicles.

They’ll come up with a clever name for it, like Snowmageddon.

It’s almost like they could record it as stock footage once every ten years and dust it off, the one time they need it in each of the following years.

But let’s not be cynical. On the lighter side, kids are making snowpeople, sliding down hills on garbage bags and throwing frozen projectiles at each other. Their lucky parents have taken the day off to film it all for posterity.

It’s a wonderland out there, alright. And perhaps because everyone knows that it’s never going to be anything but short lived, it is something to be grasped and enjoyed. Like it’s a gift. Like it may never be given again. Like the only moment is now. And like so many of them in life, it’s fleeting.

It’s a shame we often only realize it later.

School teachers have it a bit different though. In previous years, the 6:30am call or text from an administrator may have come as a lovely surprise. I remember once, about a decade ago, it came the morning after the staff Christmas party. Divine intervention, if you will.

This year, it was widely anticipated. In fact, it was all that people were talking about the previous day, which was just the second day back after three weeks of holiday.

Teachers, eh? Go ahead and roll your eyes if you want. We all have choices when it comes to career paths.

And though many people will have to make the trudge to work today in traffic chaos, teachers have been told that they are free to go back to bed.

Or, do all the things that they’ve always wanted to do, if only their time was theirs alone. Or, do nothing if the mood so strikes them. There’s not enough of that in our lives, I think.

A swim at the public pool across the street. Somehow the people who run the place were able to make it in. The lanes were open and uncrowded today and I felt like I cut through the water like a hot knife through butter.

Make some new candles, make some banana bread, wait for a Fedex shipment that you know is never going to arrive.

Make another pot of coffee, read a bunch of pages. Read a few more. Clean the kitchen, clean the bathroom, take apart a bed frame and put it on Facebook marketplace. Nobody’s coming to buy it today though.

Put another record on, one that you forgot you had. Fill the place with music.

Don’t start your tax return, don’t check your work email, both will still be there tomorrow and the day after that too.

And as the afternoon fades and turns into evening and evening turns into night and the temperature drops, light a few of your new candles and wonder if you might get the chance to do it all again tomorrow, knowing that you made the most of this thing that just dropped out of the sky.

But there’s no need to get greedy. You have enjoyed it while it lasted. What else is there?