I was hoping we were going to get hit with a lot of snow, that I could spend the day outside with the kids. I thought we’d build a snow fort at the back of the driveway where my plow had piled up snow, and then go down to Windham Center School and sled on the hill in back. Not so. We were able to drive across town to our friends’ house—also teachers with young kids—to drink coffee and let the kids run around. If they were disappointed to not have more snow, they didn’t show it. Last time we had a storm, Cormac asked me to build a fort. I spent an hour shoveling and packing and then hollowing out a cave. He played in it for twenty minutes before deciding he was too cold; he went inside, changed into warm clothes, and curled up with hot cocoa and a book.
Last night, I tried to think of my earliest memories of snow storms and school cancellations. Before I entered nursery school at the age of three, I used to spend my days at a neighbor’s house. Her name was Helen. My parents lived in my mother’s parents’ basement, and Helen was the next door neighbor. She watched several neighborhood children. I have surprisingly good memories of being watched by Helen. One of my strongest memories is of getting angry with my mom for bringing me to Helen’s on the day of a snow storm. My mother was a first grade teacher who usually left for school early. On this day my mother got me bundled up to go for a walk along the sidewalk. I recall the snow towering over me. I thought she had no school that day and would be spending it with me. She must have merely had a late opening, and what she did was walk me straight to Helen’s house to drop me off for the day, and I remember feeling as if I had been tricked and getting really angry with her.
I have a similar memory, without the anger and trickery, of walking down tunnel-like passages of snow a few days after the Blizzard of ’78. I was almost nine.
My elementary and middle schools were right next to each other, and the elementary school had a good sledding hill I recall going to after a few snowstorms. We could start at the playground and sled right into the woods. Madison was a pretty wealthy town, and I knew many kids whose families went skiing throughout the winters. They’d come to school on Mondays with their ski passes still attached to their jackets. It was popular to leave them on all season to show off how often you went skiing. My family was not well off, and I never went skiing. My friends were mostly from modest backgrounds, too, and the things I remember were playing hockey on a couple of nearby ponds and hiding behind stone walls to throw snowballs at cars. That and trying to ride our dirt bikes on the ice. Just dumb stuff, other than the hockey.
In high school my friends and I did really reckless stuff in the snow. We would go street skiing by holding onto the back bumper of someone’s car while wearing our dress shoes (Catholic school dress code!) and driving down poorly plowed streets that had a good covering of ice. Or we’d go driving on the back roads in the Naugatuck Valley. My buddy Jack had an old convertible, and he’d drive with the top down and deliberately spin the steering wheel so the car would lose control and plow into a snow drift. If we left our seatbelts off and he car hit just right, we might get launched out of the car and into the snow bank. Believe me, I think about those things now and am amazed at how stupid we were, and how lucky we were that none of us ever got killed. Every now and then I hear about high school boys getting hurt or killed in some dumb stunt, and I think, “There but for the grace of God …†I also try to let my memory give me empathy for those boys who do such stupid shit.
Nowadays I mostly dread snow days because I feel like I get behind in my work, I spend a disproportionate part of the day removing snow, and my wife and kids just end up losing another day off in June. They seem like more of an inconvenience than anything else. At the beginning of our teaching careers, we were living on the campus of a boarding school in Simsbury and I was commuting each day to Hebron. On snowy days I would have to leave extra early to get to work on time, and one day I got all the way to RHAM High only to find that school had been cancelled. This was before we all had cell phones.
UConn was late to close today, and I found myself thinking about when I was an undergrad and there was less sensitivity to commuters. Seems like the campus never closed then. I would trudge across that field to Arjona in the worst kind of weather. I had a couple of courses in rooms with fireplaces, and on snowy days I would fantasize about classes held beside roaring fires. Of course some poor student would have had to haul wood and another would have had to get the fire going, and it was probably too hot by the fire and too cold on the other side of the room, but I liked the fantasies nonetheless.
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