Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

The rain that started my commute transformed into snow by the end of it.  Does this count as the first snow of the season?  What would the meteorologists say about it?  As far as the national weather service is concerned, “winter” begins on December 1st, but does it count as the first snow if nothing accumulates?  Mixed with rain, this snow is really wet, and in fact, much closer to snish.  Am I making sense?  I don’t think I’m making sense.  Let me try again.

When I was a kid growing up in Jersey, me and every other kid in the neighborhood looked forward to every new snowfall.  Snow had miraculous powers in our eyes, for it was one of the only forces on Earth that could reliably cancel school.  If I woke up and there was white stuff on the street, I would spend the early morning watching the list of school closings scroll by on cable access at an achingly slow pace, my fingers crossed the whole time.  If my school was in this blessed list, it meant a day of sleeping late, hot chocolate, and building snowmen.

I have many happy snow memories.  I can’t remember the first snow of my seventh year, which is a shame, because it’s the first snow I would have been able to walk through.  I’m sure I greeted it with a mix of fear and excitement.  It snowed once on Thanksgiving.  The snow was powdery that day, and I can still remember the way it looked as I tossed it in the air and watched the sunlight glitter through it on the way back down.  I remember our dog, a white poodle, hopping around on all four legs, practically invisible as he bounced happily through the tundra in our backyard.   I also remember the blizzard of ‘96.  Striking in early January, it dumped thirty-six inches of snow on the Northeast in a little over a day.  A state of emergency was declared.  School was canceled for over a week, and owing to the timing I referred to this period as Christmas II:  The Reckoning.

It wasn’t until college that my attitude toward snow changed, from a miracle that could get you out of work to an inconvenience that gets in the way of work.  Still, I would encounter the inevitable freshman from southern California, or Florida, or Arizona.  These people had never seen snow in person before, except maybe at a ski resort, and at the age of eighteen they greeted it with the kind of wonderment that I had at age six.

Even at the age of twenty-three, snow still has a kind of magic.  When it snows the air is mysteriously warmer, and the world a little brighter.  For me, the first real snow is the one that gives me a little hint of the feeling I used to get when I was ten, because even with my adult annoyance, that magical feeling still lurks somewhere in my heart.  Today’s snow isn’t the first snow of the season, at least not for me, because that feeling wasn’t there.  Not yet, anyway.