Storms

I checked my email today and was delighted to find something from one of my childhood friends, my neighbor growing up, my first and only babysitter. The daughter of the tall, beautiful woman who paced around nervously on her toes in my parent's tiny summer cabin of a house the day I was born, smack in the middle of March and a blizzard.

Tracy wrote to her sister and me to share her feelings, which like mine tend to skew nostalgic and sentimental, on winter storms. If you grew up where we did, on a private dirt road populated by a handful of families in modest houses situated between two lakes, then you might feel the way we do about storms. Respectful. Worshipful. Loving. We see the value in a good storm.

We each lamented in our own way our inability to recreate this winter wonderland for our children. When we were their ages we were bundled tightly in mismatched outer wear, rarely were we the first one to wear anything, and sent outside to play. Those were truly the only instructions ever given. Go play.

Our kids are spoiled. All of them. We have spoiled them with our best intentions, our fatter wallets, our two parent homes, where both mom and dad are involved in all aspects of their lives.

My friend Tracy wrote about snow days far better than I ever could, with wit and humor my writing often lacks. Find a portion of her email below, I hope she doesn't mind me sharing it:

"These lame snowstorms make me feel like an old man: When I was a kid, we would be lucky if we got a two-hour delay! The buses could barely make it up the hill to get to school and would then slowly slide down that same hill on the way home. And the kids all cheered with joy. And if we did have a snow day, there was no TV watching or iPad playing. No, we would play outside until our Kmart mittens were covered in ice chunks. Our parents didn’t run outside if the triplets hit us in the face with an ice ball - that’s right… not a snow ball, an ice ball. We were left to navigate our sleds down the hill, steeling ourselves to get the winded knocked out of us after attempting to slide through the path of pricker bushes that lead to the steep jump that my older brother had built. And the wind did get knocked out of us and we cheered for joy! Our skin would be cold, wet and red when we got inside, but we didn’t get frostbite, or catch pneumonia. We just drank our watery hot cocoa and cheered for joy. Kids these days."