Let it snow!

My iPhone has a built-in app that provides information about the weather.  The app is aptly named "Weather."  After you tell it where you live, it gives you the current temperature and state of precipitation. 

"Weather" also provides a forecast for each hour during the next 24 hours and for every day for the next nine days.  Its report of the current weather is usually fairly accurate.  Its forecast of future conditions tends to be abysmal.  And yet, I constantly rely on "Weather" to decide when and whether to go running or walking.  "The triumph of hope over experience," was how Samuel Johnson described "remarriage."  It applies to my reliance on my "Weather" app as well.

What precipitated (sic) these remarks, you may ask?  Right now, "Weather" tells me that it is snowing outside, has been snowing since 7 p.m., and will continue snowing for the next 24 hours.  (To be fair to my hapless app, the Seattle Times also predicts snow with an accumulation of three to six inches.

And yet, here it is past 9 p.m., and when I look outside, all I see is rain.  [pause for new inspection]  Well, the rain maybe now looks slightly "fatter" than our usual rain.  It doesn't look like snow, but maybe it looks like rain considering the possibility of someday becoming snow.  It looks like something that provides at least a glimmer of hope that snow, real snow, might possibly fall before morning.  But it could also be feeling deceptive.

I'll just have to wait until I wake up after a sound night's sleep, run to the window in my footie pajamas with bunny ears, and check it out. 

Let's face it.  Snow or no snow is merely a curiosity for me now, in my old age.  But I look back on days when a nighttime snowfall, with snow that (hooray!) "stuck," opened up awesome possibilities of -- yes, "no school!"  My brother and I would arise earlier than usual so we could listen to the "school closing" reports on the local radio.  We continuously eyed the quality and quantity of on-going snowfall, and measured the snow -- if there was actually enough to be measurable -- on the ground with a ruler.  We would even -- I blush to admit it -- engage in frenzied "snow dances" in the living room, in the hopes of persuading the snow gods to shower ever increasing loads of snow upon our local school district.

Snow!  O glorious snow!  Its importance to our lives was almost existential.  All our hopes and dreams rode upon it.  Especially, of course, if we had a paper due or an exam scheduled for which we were not totally prepared.

But all that was in my schoolboy past.  Then there were a number of years when I had to at least pretend to be irritated at snow because it made it difficult getting to work.  Secretly, I still loved it, of course.  But one was expected to act adult.  Outwardly, around real adults, despite how one really felt. 

Now?  Now neither the intense joy of youth nor the ersatz irritation of irritable middle age remains.  Life is more equable.  Snow?  It simply gives me pleasure to look out upon a snowy landscape; to crunch along a sidewalk covered with snow; to spot the tracks of dogs, cats and birds; to rejoice in the muffled silence that snow imposes; to return to my house, change into dry clothes and enjoy a hot cup of coffee.

Just snow, damn it!  Tonight!