Remember when you were a child and just couldn’t wait to get out into that beautiful, fluffy, white stuff falling from the sky? It was all you could do to stand still while your parents stuffed you into layers and layers of clothes, so thick that you could barely walk out the door. With your only your eyes visible through a scarf that was wrapped around your head so many times, you couldn’t turn your head from side to side, yet you could stick out your tongue to catch those wonderful little flakes hitting your face. The snowflakes would sit on your eye lashes and your face got so cold it would sting. But you didn’t care or want to go inside ’cause you were having so much fun.
I can still picture the silence and serenity during a new snowfall. It was so peaceful and quiet. Everything was so bright because of the light reflecting off the snow. The air smelled so crisp and clean, like it just had a bath. I was in awe of the stuff and would sometimes just sit on a pile of it and listen to the quiet and the soft sound as it would gently fall on the ground around me. It was a treat to roll around in it, and then make snow angels, and then have snowball fights with your friends and siblings.
When I was a child, our dad used to make a snow slide behind a pole that was in front of a wall in our backyard, complete with little foot holds up the front end for us to put our feet in to climb to the top. Then we would take our mom’s best baking sheets and slide down. We would spend hours upon hours just having fun. Our parents would bring us some hot chocolate to warm up a bit and then we went back to it. Between the sliding, snowman and snow fort building and snowball fights, we’d spend pretty much the whole day outdoors, as did most of the neighborhood kids. Of course, there were no video games and computers back then to distract us from having all this physical fun.
When it was snowing real hard, my siblings and I would pretend we were on a dangerous journey through the frozen tundra, fighting our way through a blizzard to get to an unknown destination, where we would then begin to build a fort. Our forts were just big piles of snow between the parked cars on our streets where we would hollow out the inside and make little windows. It was so much fun pretending to be on a secret mission. And we never had any mishaps with snow caving in and hurting anyone. I guess we were smart enough to know how to play carefully in the snow or too stupid to realize there might be any danger.
Life was so good back then. It’s a shame that our children today will never have those experiences that we had.
As annoying and troublesome as the snow may get at times, who can forget the joy as a child growing up. Every time we have a heavy snowfall and I look out the window, memories of those wonderful times come flooding back and I wish, really wish, we could go back in time to those wonderful days of childhood and growing up in a better time in America.