Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Snow Day

I just discovered another great thing about being over 60 – you don’t have to wait for somebody else to declare a snow day in order to stay home.  This is a huge relief for someone like me who worries about driving in the snow as much as she worries about misplacing her cellphone, getting a computer virus or running out of red wine.

Of course, everyone knows that fear of driving in the snow is genetic.  Neither of my grandmothers drove in the snow.  As soon as the first snowflake fell, Nana K. dug the keys to her Plymouth Duster out of her purse and went home.  It got to be a family joke – when my dad said, “I think it’s snowing,” the guests, including Nana, were supposed to leave.  And, as I said in my post “A Tale of Two Nanas,” Nana A. never drove at all, so there you have it.
 
We all knew that there was nothing that flipped out my fearless mom more than the thought of driving us to school on a snowy day.  It didn’t help that our no-outlet street absolutely never saw a snowplow.  Well, actually, during the years when a judge lived in the corner house, the plow did come to Gilna Court; but it only cleared past his driveway.  One year Mom agreed to drive the carpool every week if the dad down the street would drive whenever it snowed.  It only snowed twice that winter, but she was happy with the deal.

I inherited the family musical talent, the family taste for Miracle Whip and the family attitude toward snow driving.  If it snows, you can always put off driving to the grocery for a few days but you can't leave your kids at school until the roads are clear.  My kids attended a small, private elementary school located on top of a hill (like everything else in Cincinnati) on a narrow, residential street that never got plowed.  The director never declared a snow day because most of the parents depended on the school for day care and most of the staff lived nearby. My choice was to make a Slip-N-Slide run to and from school with our snow-challenged Volvo or to declare a personal snow day.  Talk about a no-brainer.

I absolutely loved those snow days. I loved taking our time getting up and dressed.  I loved helping David and John put on their gloves and snow pants and boots and watching through the window as they built snow forts and rode their saucers down the neighbors' hill.  I loved warming them up with dry clothes and hot cocoa when they came back inside.   And I loved the hum of their activity around the house as they dressed up as cowboys or spacemen or as they laid out yet another battle with plastic figures, vehicles, weapons and blocks.  (See my post “Toy Story.”)  Yes, I did feel guilty, just like I feel guilty when I beat Paul to the last sleeve of Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies – guilty, but not very. 

Of course there were sometimes those “terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad” days when the snow started falling right after I dropped the kids off at school.  I spent anxious hours at home watching the snow pile up on our street and wondering how early I could go pick the boys up.  Those painful memories have been blocked out along with the memories of the time we missed our flight to Canada because we didn’t bring the boys’ birth certificates and the time I got distracted while making pumpkin pies for dinner club and left out the sugar.

Fortunately, the boys rode a bus to junior high but the snow anxiety was back, bigger than ever, after they reached high school.  When I woke up to snow, I cowered under the covers, holding my breath while Jim Scott read the interminable list of school closings, hoping to hear St. X and Cincinnati Public Schools.  Some days I contemplated a move to Kentucky or Indiana – their schools were always closed for snow.  The best days were Sundays when a big snow came in early enough that Monday was declared a snow day by Sunday evening.  High schools frown on personal snow days. As a result, when school wasn't called off, my kids were driving to and from school and mixing it up in a snow covered parking lot with a bunch of other new drivers all of whom were confident that the car would stop dead the moment they touched the brakes.  It was an inexpressible relief when everyone was home and all the cars were safely in the garage.

When I worked at the boys’ old elementary school, everyone there already knew about my snow phobia which made things easier.   Nobody was surprised when I said, “I’ll be here tomorrow, unless it snows” or when I made about 300 trips from my desk to the big windows in the main office to see if the snow was sticking in the parking lot.  Now, the teacher whose students I tutor knows I won’t be there if it snows on a Monday.  The woman who cuts my hair calls to reschedule my appointment if snow is in the forecast.  Paul’s office staff doesn’t even think about calling me to fill in for a cancellation on a snowy day.

At 60 plus, I’ve given up the guilt thing entirely where driving in the snow is concerned.  I used to feel like such a weenie, especially since women of my generation were encouraged to be assertive and independent and strong.  Then I told myself that women like Betty Friedan (below) and Germaine Greer (right) all lived in New York, where driving in the snow was some taxi driver’s problem. If they had had to drive a Volvo around a snowy, hilly Midwestern suburb, they would have sung a different tune.

So, this morning, with big flakes falling and four to six inches predicted, I saw Paul off to work without even a twinge of guilt.  After all, he’s the one who loves everything about snow including driving in it, so, he’s getting exactly what he wishes for all year long.  Here's what I'm going to do today -  finish reading “Fall of Giants,” work on ideas for our vacation in June, keep up with the snow shoveling and make Verda’s Barbeque – the stringy kind not the crumbly kind.  And I won't be alone.  If I want to talk to a friend today, I know I’ll find most of them at home.

Click the link below for my new attitude toward winter weather
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv_I_EIBtrk&feature=fvsr

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