Snow Day!

Last Friday around 1:30pm, snow started falling from the sky with a cool, crisp, spitball-like consistency. By Memphis standards, it was a blizzard. The weathermen were orgasmic and school children everywhere had their noses pressed against window panes praying their parents would free them from their climate controlled prisons.

I left the office at 3:00pm and rushed to get home. All along the streets children were throwing snowballs at their parents and I couldn't wait to join them. I fully expected to see Warren and the boys putting the final touches on a snowman as I parked in front of the house.

I followed Jiro and Satchel's tiny footprints up the walkway and swung open the front door. Warren had every coat, glove, hat, and boot we owned scattered throughout the living room and bedroom. The long forgotten hand-me-down snowsuits were finally getting a chance to fulfill their destiny!

Once we were all sufficiently bundled up, we got the dogs and headed to Overton Park. It was nothing short of a winter wonderland.



Snow like this is a rarity in Memphis and we were all running through the trails simply amazed and delighted.

Before I left the office, I had gotten an email from a new friend in town asking if I had an extra sled. "People in Memphis don't own sleds," I wrote back. "They must fashion them from household items or things strewn about the yard." We've used garbage can tops, intertubes, you name it.

I relayed this story to Warren and he said, "Let's go by Stewart Brothers Hardware and see what they have."

Twenty minutes and thirty dollars later we were the proud owners of a plastic torpedo and a plastic tornado. Warren tied a string to the torpedo and pulled the boys through the movie theater parking lot until it got dark. Then we went inside to eat snow cones. (We just happened to have a Japanese variety of snow cone syrup, thanks to Oba in California.)

Saturday morning, the boys were up at 6:30, ready to get back in the snow. We took the sleds to the park and spent hours pulling the boys across fileds and pushing them down hills.



At one point, Warren attempted to fashion a dog sled, but thankfully the idea failed before the dogs could pull the boys into the nearby pond.


By Saturday afternoon, the snow was pretty much melted. (Thankfully it turned to slush and not ice, so the whole city didn't close down.) Warren enthusiastically said, "If we lived in Alaska, we'd have months of weather like this!"

As fun as it was to play in the snow, I think I still prefer it once every few years. Waking up to inches (or feet) of snow everyday seems more morose than magical.