SNOW!

The weather station predicted snow showers this afternoon, and sure enough, as I was heading to church for a worship committee meeting, the flakes began to sift down, one here, one there. By the time we began our meeting, it was pelting the window. My car is a white mound in the parking lot and the grass has disappeared. I feel the chill of excitement. Winter! Soon the dead brown of autumn will be blanketed with fresh white snow, scrubbing the pollen and fleas from the face of nature.

My colleague, who is from Cuba, can hardly focus on our discussion. Snow is still a wonder for her. She finally excuses herself to call her friend who just arrived. This is her first time ever seeing snow. I can imagine the joy! The rest of us smile. We remember being excited about the first snow, before we got jaded about the shoveling/driving parts.

One year when I was attending college in New York and my parents had moved to Texas, I awoke to a Currier and Ives "snow filling the air blanket of white on the ground" scene. I was so excited I quite forgot that my parents lived in a different time zone and I bounced out of bed and called Mom. She answered the phone and I was so excited I missed the hint of worry in her voice. Why would anyone be calling at 5 am unless it was an emergency?

I gushed on and on about the snow and how exciting it was until I finally ran out of words. Then Mom said, "Is that why you called? Nothing is wrong?" Suddenly I saw things from her eyes. First snowfalls are meaningless if you can't see them, if you haven't been living with dead leaves and brown grass that suddenly are transformed before your eyes. Joy is not necessarily contagious over the phone, especially at 5 am. Moms have their limits. I felt sick inside. What a fool I had been, how thoughtless of me. My silence was deafening.

"Enjoy your snow. I'm going back to bed," Mom said. Click. Dial tone. I sat in my dorm room stunned at my unthinking intrusion into my Mother's world. Please forgive me. Just then, my dorm sisters tumbled out of the side door into the white new world beneath my window. They scooped up the white slush and tossed snowballs at each other, yelling and laughing. I couldn't resist. I grabbed my coat and mittens and headed out, properly sobered but still up for some joy.