Snow Play

There is something quite refreshing about the first view of undisturbed, newly fallen snow.  The world looks fresh and hopeful with all of its blemishes and winter dreariness camouflaged.  Such was the scene we beheld this morning when we awoke to a white wonderland of three inches of fresh snow covering our street and yard.

Snow has a way of bringing out the kid in many of us, especially while living in an area that doesn’t provide it with any regularity.  Though we didn’t actually go out and immerse ourselves in it, even at our age snow evokes memories of play when we were younger.

Jim remembers a time in the winter when he was a child playing outside with his pals on just such a day.  First they created the boundaries of a huge circle by making footprints in the snow.  Then they intersected the circle with cross paths through the center from several points along the circle’s boundary.  Within this now defined play area, next they invented their modified rules for a typical game of tag.  Adding a requirement that players must stay on the paths of the circle in order to “tag” someone, with some ingenuity the magic of snow yielded hours of play.

When I was quite young, my parents, my brother, and I built a huge snowman in the front yard with a hat, stick arms, carrot nose, and its eyes and mouth made of black rocks.  Overlooking our father’s Ford dealership that was situated across the street from our home, the snowman survived for days to wave at my dad while he worked.  I remember singing “Frosty The Snowman” over and over again to our creation, while he stood guard over us.

On another occasion, I purposely buried a toy in the snow in the same yard, only to lose track of it as more snow fell.  Impatiently, I had to wait for weeks until the snow melted enough to find it, imagining during the entire interval that “snow gremlins” were stealing it from me. 

As we grew older, my brother and I collaborated to build rooms with an igloo type of roof and door, calling them snow forts.  Once frozen, these temporary shelters could provide entertainment for days before they melted.  Ultimately, we surrounded them with more walls of snow.  Then these forts spawned snowball fights, along with hide and seek games.

Once during our youth, upstate New York received several feet of snow during one weather event.  The snow was so deep, my father borrowed a neighbor’s bulldozer to plow us out.  School was closed for days.  As children, we were delighted.  Living on a farm surrounded by hills, we created our own ski run, and rode downhill with our cousins on our father’s homemade toboggan for hours in the snow.

If I could go back in time, it would be to those fresh and hopeful, newly fallen snow moments, when no cares mattered except devising the rules of play in nature’s perfect playground.