Monday Musings - Snow Days

 

My kids were supposed to start back to school on Friday.  Instead, Mother Nature decided that middle Tennessee (along with much of the rest of the country) needed boat loads of snow.  To be fair, we only got about 6"-8", but for the South, that's a lot.  We don't have the infrastructure in place to make any amount of snow a non-problem.  We also usually have a problem with black ice, and a very large school district.  We've had snow WEEKS out of school because some of the more far flung areas of the district still had dangerous icy patches a week later.  Not a problem this week, of course.  It was dump a lot of snow on Thursday, still be super cold so it doesn't melt on Friday, warm up into the 50s on Saturday and have every bit of snow gone by Sunday.  My kids were really hoping that they wouldn't have school today either.

I used to love snow days when I was growing up.  I lived in New York State, where snow from November through March was a constant way of life.  It took a lot for us to get a snow day, because there we had plows and salt trucks all standing at the ready when bad weather was forecasted.  I remember listening to the TV and the radio for the hope that school would be cancelled, wishing that my school would be called.  Very rarely, it was.  But those were the days that I could go outside, bundled up in snow pants, a heavy jacket, gloves, hat and scarf and push snow into snowmen, trying to get the balls large enough that I would see the brown grass underneath.  I would try to make snowmen on the hill above the road, wanting to give people driving by a small smile.  And when I was cold enough that I'd lost feeling in my extremities, I would come inside and ask for hot chocolate.  They were magical days where school didn't matter and the glittering white stuff was all that counted.

Things are very different for my kids' snow days.  Not only is there smaller amounts of snow necessitating it, but they can find out through the internet that school has been cancelled.  No waiting to see if their district is called, watching the television eagerly.  More often than not, we would get a call at 5 am telling us that school was closed for the day, and we'd groggily tell the kids before going back to sleep ourselves.  We rarely would get enough snow to make good snow men.  The kids would go outside and play for a little while, but they didn't have the cold weather gear that I'd had as a kid.  More often than not, they would stay inside, making it a day of video games and watching TV.

After last year, I thought that snow days would be a thing of the past.  Not because we didn't get snow, but more because we'd gone fully virtual.  Even with coming back to in person schooling, the virtual infrastructure was still there.  All the kids had laptops and (I believe) hot spots to get online if they couldn't be in school.  I expected that instead of saying we had a snow day, they would tell us it would be a virtual day.  I was kind of ok with that - having the virtual schedule we did last year gave my kids breathing room to do other things throughout the day, which is something we all loved.  But the governor of our state, along with the Commissioner of Education, made it so that schools cannot go virtual when they need to without prior approval and then only in strict circumstances.  Our district was in the cross hairs because we are one of the largest and we didn't bow down when the governor told us to have all kids in classrooms and no mask mandates, instead following the science to keep the kids safe.

So snow days are here to stay.  And that's probably good.  It gives my kids a chance to be kids, even if it's only to play more video games.  And it gives me a chance to reminisce about the snow days of my own youth.

Snow covered Tennessee