Tuesday, February 9, 2010

A Winterless Wonderland

My boots are out. The puppy’s winter wear is at the ready. And I’ve stocked up on the essentials (cheese and chocolate). The family is ready for Winter Storm Watch 2010!

Of course, I was ready last weekend too. Could hardly contain my excitement, in fact. And for what? A flurry that didn’t even rival a mild case of dandruff. The depth of last weekend’s disappointment simply cannot be described.

Which is why I’m trying to temper my expectations for tomorrow’s snowfall. However, hailing from the snow belt of Cleveland—which does snow with the best of them—this is difficult. When I was growing up and the forecast was for snow, you can bet you were getting snow. And it would take a gargantuan amount of snow to close school—it needed to be measured in feet. A foot of snow wasn’t going to cut it. Most times, two feet wouldn’t either. The governor of Ohio actually had to call my school district’s superintendent once to get him to close school one particularly horrible winter. That’s how accustomed we were to huge amounts of snow.

I miss those winters. Of course, snowy weather is always more fun when you’re a kid and don’t have to go to work. I get that. But it does little to diminish my intense disappointment in Manhattan winters. More than a decade and a half of lousy snowfall here (save a few glorious snowstorms here and there) has me positively nostalgic for blizzard conditions.

I’m trying to stay positive as I arrange my mittens and haul out my snow pants. And the glove warmers I’ve been holding all day like a rabbit’s foot? They’re for good luck.

4 comments:

  1. I'm thinking since Bloomberg shut down all of nyc schools before any snow has fallen, we're in for some snow. There better be 2 feet out there to keep these kids at home, that's all I have to say!

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  2. Here's hoping you get some snow, but I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the concept of hoping for it. Then again we are buried here again already and Forbes rated us the worst winter out of the Top 50 U.S. cities.

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  3. We have about 10 inches here in Chicago. The kids had the time of their lives making snow forts, building snow men, pelting unsuspecting people over the privacy fence and now are rosey cheeked drinking hot chocolate with mini-marshmellows. Ahhh the good old days.....

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  4. Sigh...we remain snowless. (Cue violins.) Cold, dreary and snowless.

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