It's a Snow Day!

Was summoned for a dog walk at 5:00 a.m., no time to wake up with a coffee - and the first thing we see is four feet of snow outside the front door. Even for a Great Dane, this was high. But we plowed through until he finally found a spot to empty those bowels. Right in the middle of the road. And since I was covered in snow already, I shovelled out our sidewalk. No point in doing the driveway. No one's going anywhere today. Certainly not on my street. Some fool has his car stuck in the middle of the road and so we can forget about any snow-plows till he moves it.

Just a nice day to stay in and listen to AM radio tell us about everything that's closed. Which is basically everything. When the cops say don't go on the roads unless it's an emergency, that means the whole town is shut down. When the taxis are only making trips to hospitals, that says it all. Still, I'm sure I could get a bottle of booze delivered if I really wanted one. It would be a nice day to sit in front of a fire, look out the front door window and curl up inside a nice glass of red wine.

And it's about time we had a Snow Day. Even though London is supposedly in the middle of a 'snow belt,' we haven't had an official snowday in decades. Back in the late 70s actually. I remember it was the winter of '77. I remember that year because the year before was the year they had all that flooding down in Windsor. I remember that because it was in 1976 that they finished building the Ambassador Bridge. Before that, if you wanted to cross the river you had to take the ferry over to Detroit. All it cost was a nickel. American nickels had a picture of a bee on the one side back then. So if you wanted a return trip on the ferry, the ferry-man would tell you "That'll be two bees." But if you wanted to buy a soda over there, that would be just one bee. So when you left the house in the morning you would make sure you had plenty of bees in your pocket.

Ah, winter memories. Course they don't have nickels with bees on them up here. But that doesn't matter. We have snow. Four feet of it.

I leave you with Wally Cox's thoughts of snow taken from his book, My Life as a Small Boy (1961, Scribners.) ... "I always wanted the snow to make everything disappear. It seemed to me that snow had a sense of humor. Snow fell for the fun of it. Adults had no use for it, and kids did, so it seemed to be on our side, as few things were."