Villainy

Other days you could crisp, crisp, crisp around in circles with your little feet and cut out snow-pizzas, thin and fragile, or you could dig down deeper the next day and bring up bricks to build a fort. You'd get the iced up snow sometimes, which was great for sliding. (Probably could have benefited from a helmet back then, soaring down that hill with snot frozen in long streaks like whiskers out from my nose.) But it was only rarely that you got that perfect mixture of snow and wet, like the sky raining snowballs, or opportunity snow, as I always saw it. - Erin

We had YET another snowstorm this week, crazy amounts of snow making everything white - the hills, the trees, the stroller accidentally left on the ground - and I'm tired of it. None of our mittens have mates, the snowboots are all outgrown, coats and snowpants show an inch of ankle or wrist. My winter boots spring leaks as soon as I step outside. We are done with winter but winter is not done with us.

Two old men were standing outside the grocery store talking and watching me with amusement as I pulled The Baby's stroller through the unyielding snowy muck in the parking lot.
"I don't know what everyone's talking about," said one old guy. "This is just a good old fashioned winter."
"Yep," said the other old guy. "Back when I was a kid, we used to always have snow like this. Sometimes it stuck around till June."
They both seemed pleased with this thought, and then offered unsolicited opinions on how The Baby was now too old to be riding in her stroller - true, but she also can't make it on through the snowy sidewalks, so she's stuck riding until spring. Should spring ever come, of course.

I could probably find some way to enjoy the rest of winter, but as soon as I think of something - taking The Baby out sliding, for example - my brain rejects it as unworthy while making rude raspberry noises. So we're just hanging out, not going anywhere, not doing anything and not being very happy, just waiting for all of this snow to magically go away and for lovely spring to come and meanwhile some invisible clock is counting down and these days will never, ever come back.