This Is What Real Snow Is

The forecast this weekend mentions an 80% chance of snow on Sunday. The high will be 40°, and today is 60° so the chance of any significant or insignificant accumulation is pretty low.

That’s too bad.

It snowed in January. I ended up with between 3″ and 4″ at my house. I liked it. The dog liked it. It was … okay. It was not the snow event I’d been hoping for, waiting for.

I guess we’ve already had our once-a-decade big snow in 2003. For that snow, I was in Las Vegas and missed the flakes coming down. I also missed coming home when I was supposed to thanks to a snow closure at Philadelphia International, but that was okay. Worse places to be than Las Vegas for an extra day, and the guys at the parking lot helped shovel out my car. I somehow ended up being charged a vacation day for that day even though my then employer was closed because of snow emergencies, but I’m not bitter about that anymore … really.

What I am bitter about is the lack of big snow. I like snow. I want several feet of snow every winter. And not a seasonal accumulation of several feet. I want multiple snowstorms, each delivering several feet of snow to my house.

Digging out in 1983

It used to be like that. I don’t think it’s just the gauzy film of memory. This snowstorm, for example, in 1983. That’s what I’m talking about. Okay, maybe my dad didn’t relish shoveling our driveway multiple times during the snowfall, but my entire family liked taking walks in the snow and how it looked. My mom felt so strongly about the look of a snow-covered lawn that any playing in the snow was restricted to the backyard so our footprints wouldn’t sully the front yard.

Corn: It’s What’s for Dinner

Last night for dinner, I had corn on the cob. That’s it. Just corn on the cob.

Six lovely, buttery, salty, peppery pieces of corn, of which I ate four. There was nothing else on the plate. No burgers or hot dogs. Nothing from the grill. Just corn.

That’s how I’ve almost always eaten corn. In the summer, my family would sit down to the occasional dinner of corn on the cob. The four of us would go through a dozen ears (or was it 18?). There wasn’t anything fancy about it. Husk the corn, boil it, season it, eat it. Repeat steps 3 and 4 as needed. Ears ready to be denuded would wait their turn under a tent of foil. Gnawed-at cobs would take their places on the sides of our plates or on a trash plate.

Remember when …

It’s funny and strange in a nice way. Over the past month or so, I’ve reconnected with old pals…

I’ll leave tales of ficus trees in an Amsterdam attic and adventures with gaffers tape for a later post. For this one, I wanted to look back over 30 years after reconnecting with my friend Leigh. We’ve known each other since elementary school but lost touch after high school. And I’m glad that we’re back in touch. It always amazes me how people can mean so much to you at a specific time in your life and then disappear altogether from the rest of it. And it amazes me how, for some of those people, you can get get back in touch and then re-establish a new friendship based on who you are now, many decades later.

Here’s a picture of us in 1st grade.

That’s me in the plaid dress at the right end of the second row. I’ll protect Leigh by not identifying her in the picture. Mrs. Wendt was my favorite teacher in elementary school. She taught me how to write in cursive. I loved her. She and my mom stayed in touch for many years.