Snow Happens

About Winter-

I’ve had Seasonal Affective Disorder for longer than I care to say though when I was a child Winter was my favorite season of the year, stark and pristine in a manichaean way.  Full of fun activities like snow forts and sledding, ice skating and snowball fights, skiing and snowmen.

Oh, and by the way, did I mention snow?

Huge piles of it, soft and deep, making everything… clean.  As it melted I used to walk past the remaining patches imagining myself on Mars.

Over on the next street we had the longest sled run in the world, starting on the boundary of the witches at the top of the hill and zooming through the hedges between the yards all the way down the block until you got dumped off the jump at the end and skidded to a stop in a shower of sparks on the street (watch out for those cars).

Of course I never got invited to the ‘cool’ slope that plunged at 70 degrees into a thicket of trees you could bash your head against, but one perfect day after an ice storm my sister and I discovered the parking lot and driveways of the Church a block away covered in a thick unsalted sheet.

Now that was fun, almost like a Skeleton run, and if you got your speed up just right and jammed your Flexible Flyer over hard you could pull as many as 4 or 5 360 degree spins before you smashed into the plow tailings in the bottom most lot.

Take that ‘cool’ kids.

Like many of you today I face the prospect of chipping through 4 to 6 inches of ‘Wintry Mix’ with an inch or two of ice at the bottom and I can’t feel the fun any more.  At least I was able to convince Richard and Emily not to drive to Florida for my Aunt’s birthday even though it’s a milestone.

As for myself, I just can’t stop thinking about climate change and the death of the world I once knew.

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. -Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

As the reigning Lorelai I think it’s high past time to think about our relationship with snow-

I have never, ever taken refuge by calling any of my diaries ‘community’ as if that invoked some kind of safey bubble of immunity (it has been appended by people who don’t understand my work).  I stand alone and if you don’t like what I write have at.