I love snow. At least, I love to look at snow. If I can sit in a comfy chair (with a good book, of course), sipping hot tea or cocoa, I can look at snow for hours. When it's falling, it fills the air with a certain mystique. When it's coating everything like a blanket, it creates a kind of hush in the air. Sunshine on new-fallen snow seems to bring a brightness to my soul.
Then we squeal back to reality. The piles of dirty, gray snow that block access to the mailbox. The slickness of refrozen snow that makes walking treacherous. The cold that grabs my bronchii and makes me cough and cough. Shoveling a path to that blocked mailbox down my driveway that seems to get longer every year. My back complains and my arms give out. The salt I put down to prevent slipping eats away at shoes. The cheap boots I wear so the good ones don't get ruined cause blisters.
Need I go on? Not for those of you who live this, too. But, there is a plus side to all this. Besides what I listed above, there are other pleasantries that come from a significant snow fall in the Chicago suburbs.
There's the neighbor kids' snowman (half covered with dead leaves) that makes me smile. There's the next door neighbor who has a small snow plow and, if the thing will start, plows our driveway (although I still have to shovel around the cars). There's the the little kid walking out of CVS who catches a snowflake on his tongue and grins. There's the stranger who grabs your arm when you start to slip in the WalMart parking lot. There's the sight of a bunch of kids sledding down a hill by the park and remembering when you could do that, too.
Yeah, a few weeks from now, even some of those things will have lost their magic. But, for now, right before Christmas, it does my heart good. And my heart needs all the good it can get!
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