The Absence of Snow

While I was growing up, it would have been a dream come true to find a snowy scene as beautiful as the one above taken near our old farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick. Tay Creek had more snow than even I bargained for when I set off to raise cattle.
My youth was not snow deprived. I feel fortunate that my childhood took place in the fifties and sixties in North Carolina. We lived in a small, rural town just west of Winston-Salem. My first distinct memories of snow are from when I was in the fifth grade at the Lewisville School which housed grades one through eight. In March 1960, it started snowing on my birthday early that month. They sent us home from school before lunch which wasn’t a big deal for me since I walked to school. Like many in those days we lived on a dirt road. We were lucky. Our home was only one hundred feet from pavement but there were others who lived miles into a red dirt road. Snow made a mess of those roads so school was often called off until the dirt roads dried up. We hardly went to school that March 1960 because it snowed for three Wednesdays in a row. It was a very unique weather event.
My life after high school could be summarized by saying, “He started going north and didn’t stop until the roads were blocked with snow.” As a result we spent years in snow country (Canada) before turning south and finding the mountains of Southwest Virginia. There was enough snow and ice there that we eventually ran from it after seventeen years and ended up living for fifteen years on the North Carolina coast. We now live in the foothills on the western edge of the Piedmont about twenty-five minutes southwest of where I grew up and enjoyed that snowy month without school in March 1960. In our fifteen years on the coast, we had a few snows that mostly disappeared by noon. The most impressive one and probably the last one the area has seen came in January 2018. 
At our current location the last snow was January 18, 2022. Snow has not completely disappeared from the Carolina Piedmont, it is just getting a little more rare. It is climate related I am sure so there is little that we can do in the short term. However, we are entering a patch of very cold, even record-breaking weather for some areas. All we need is moisture and snow will be back in our yards. If we are on a trend to have more infrequent snows, we all should be a little sad and not just from the climate change that it represents.
The excitement of snow day when you were in elementary school in the fifties is hard to convey. The authorities did not make it easy to get excited because they refused to announce school closings until early the morning of the closings. We would crowd around the radio hoping to hear our county’s name included in the list of closings. There were no text messages, emails, or web sites to check. Once school was closed, it was like someone had added a day to your year and said happy birthday, this is your day. All pressures were gone, any tests had vaporized, and your neighborhood was a giant snowfield ready for you to make your mark on it. I am not sure there are many times in life that you get to enjoy that kind of freedom. The one thing that could be guaranteed is that a taste of that pure freedom made you crave more. In 1960, it never seemed to end.
In 1963, I went off to boarding school and you don’t get snow days there. You also don’t get snow days at college. At least we didn’t in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I completely understand that a snow day sixty-four years after that wondrous March 1960 is a lot more complex. Parents have to make child care arrangements instead of letting the kids join the free-roaming herd of neighborhood children. Businesses don’t want to get sued for someone slipping on ice or lose sales by closing down for a day.
I guess my point is that snow days are something of a symbol of a simpler time. I can remember getting snowed in on the mountain where we lived overlooking Roanoke, Virginia. The kids went outside and played with all the neighboring kids, and we were not that upset that we didn’t know exactly where they were. We knew they were on foot, sliding down hills well-covered with snow. They always came back soaked to the bone, frozen and ready to sit around the fire and recharge their batteries from the exhaustion of pure play. Even after our the children were gone, my wife and I got snowed in there just before Christmas in 2009. It was an impressive snow as you can see from these pictures. I am pretty sure there hasn’t been a snow as impressive or at least as difficult to shovel since then.
There are lots of areas in the country that rarely if ever see snow and I am sure they produce lots of well adjusted adults, but I feel sorry that they have never gotten to have a real snow day. I am pretty sure that there is a group of kids in our subdivision with the freedom to really enjoy a snow day if we got four or five inches of the white stuff.
Everyone deserves to have a snow day or two in their life. May you get one this year and figure out how to really enjoy it.