Snow Days: A Lament

  |  February 10, 2015
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If you’ve never been trapped in the house with a surly pre-teen on the third snow day in as many weeks, you’ve never truly lived.

The first one was fine. It was during what has become affectionately known around these parts as “Flizzard 2015.” I just let her do her thing in her bedroom, and by “do her thing,” I mean curl up into a fetal position on the bottom bunk of her bunkbed and play Minecraft. Since I work from home, Minecraft has become as indispensible to me as pre-chopped lettuce and frozen mac & cheese. She becomes completely absorbed in it, and I can occasionally glance at her from my desk to ensure she’s still breathing and then spend the next 20 minutes berating myself for letting her play Minecraft for so long. Once work was finished for the day, I managed to coax her from her grotto and into the living room for Mandatory Social Interaction Time (MSIT). Because what 13 year old doesn’t want to have a long, drawn-out Q&A sesh with their mom while trapped inside a snowglobe with no chance of escape?

The second snow day came the very next Monday, when we got hit with more snow than we had during Snowplosion! 2015 or whatever we’re calling it. I did much better that time. I limited Minecraft to a half-hour and then dragged her outside to play in the snow. I come from Alaska, so on snow days (what few we had), EVERYONE went outside to play. We didn’t hide behind drawn curtains and fuzzy jammies, oh no. We put on every coat we could find, grabbed our cheap plastic dangersleds, and made for the nearest hill. And if there was no hill, we piled up the snow and made our own hill. We had no iPods; only our frozen, pudgy fingers. Then again, my daughter could easily school me in Minecraft, so there’s that.

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The player with the most pixels wins or something?

We quickly noticed when we stepped outside that the snow wasn’t so much coming down as coming straight for our eyeballs. Undeterred, we ventured toward the center of Saugerties village, a powdered sugar-coated ghost town, stopping occasionally to look in windows. Nearly every store was closed, so we continued on Partition Street, turned left on Post Street and then onto Washington Avenue. As we approached the corner, a flock of small birds (finches, maybe? I’m terrible with bird types) ascended from their perch on a bare, snow-covered tree and met a flock of pigeons on a powerline. There they all sat, squawking away like they were meeting up at the Moose Lodge, seemingly unaffected or unaware of the blizzard happening around them. As I clumsily attempted to take a picture of the birds with my iPod, forgetting momentarily that I still had gloves on and therefore unable to affect my iPod whatsoever, I noticed that one of the pigeons was white. The other pigeons looked like regular pigeon-flavored pigeons, so the white pigeon stood out as much as a far-away white pigeon can stand out against a blizzard backdrop.

“Can we go now?” pleaded my teenaged companion. She was shivering, and the snow was coming down harder than ever, so we slowly trudged our way home, where we sank into a hot chocolate coma for the rest of the day.

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By the third snow day, I was over it. Suffering from cabin fever, I paced the house like a caged panther watching a zookeeper wave a steak in the air. I wanted out, but even more so, I wanted HER out. Not OUT out, like good-luck-out-there-write-if-you-find-work OUT. I just wanted her to put on clothes and leave the house. And since she’s still technically a minor, I would need to accompany her. So we bundled up again and walked down to the corner where the birds were a week prior. There they were, still sitting, still squawking. “I find that kind of magical, in a weird way,” I explained to my daughter. “Not for any logical reason, obviously, but the thought of a bunch of crazy birds hanging out on a powerline in the middle of a blizzard and one of them is white makes me feel confident that there’s still some kind of levity left in this world. Or maybe I’m just making too much of it because I’ve been snow-blind for the past 15 minutes. Or maybe I’m just placing whimsy where I need it to be. I don’t know. I have no idea why I see these things or think these thoughts.”

“Can we PLEASE go now?” asked my daughter, teeth chattering. “I have an itch under my arm and I can’t scratch it because I have on too many coats and gloves.”

So, we headed home. Instead of surrendering to Minecraft, though, I made her come with me to the dollar store for cheap arts and crafts. For the next 6 hours, we built a diorama of dinosaurs attacking green plastic Army guys complete with a river, mountainous backdrop, fake grass, and various Army guys missing limbs and oozing red Play-Doh while being consumed by ravenous dinosaurs with shotgun wounds.

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Kind of looking forward to the next snow day.

About Kandy Harris

Kandy is a writer and musician/music teacher living in Saugerties, NY.

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