I Miss Snow Days

Every kid who grew up in my hometown of St. Louis in the 1960s and 70s knew the “winter snow drill” by heart.

It usually began as a rumor, cautiously whispered in the classrooms and hallways at school -- scuttlebutt that indicated a big snowstorm might be rolling into town soon.

The rumors picked up steam over the next few days and before you knew it, you found yourself planted in front of the TV late one night, anxiously awaiting the 10 pm news, making sure you paid special attention to the weather report.

If the forecast confirmed the hearsay and called for snow, you dialed your excitement level up to 11, set your alarm clock for 5:30 the next morning, then went to sleep.

And when you awoke, there you were, in your bed, nice and warm beneath the covers. You sprung out of the sack to look out the window and sure enough, through the dim light of morning you saw a blanket of snow on the ground. But how much? Was it enough?

So, with a transistor tucked beneath your pillow, you waited for the announcement on KMOX Radio.

After being thoroughly creeped out by the Richard Evans Thought for the Day segment, which sounded like it had been recorded in a burial crypt (apropos, because Evans had died years earlier, while his recorded segments still aired), it was time to hear what you’d been waiting for: the morning snow closing list.

And after the schools with “Assumption” and “Ascension” in their names were read, it came, uttered by voices of authority like newsmen Bob Hardy or Rex Davis.

“Bishop DuBourg High School, closed.”

Yes! It had happened!

We’ve got a snow day, and all the trappings that go with it!

Trappings that included “sleeping in,” watching and listening to the morning TV and radio shows that you never were able to experience during the week, and enjoying a grilled-cheese-sandwich-and-tomato soup lunch with your mom while the snowflakes fell outside.

In the afternoon, it was all about snowmen, pickup snow football games with your buddies, and of course, the obligatory trek to Art Hill for sledding. (I remain amazed that the roads deemed impassable for school traffic were judged to be perfectly fine for a trip to the sled hill.)

For the more entrepreneurial among us – it was a chance to make a buck or two by shoveling some neighborhood sidewalks.

My schoolmates and I were lucky. We grew up in the pre-online age.

Today with many, if not most students having access to computers and the Internet, and in the wake of the covid-related education lockdowns, some school districts are replacing “snow days” with “virtual learning days” that require students to crack the books – remotely – while the snowflakes fall.

I get it. Book learning is important.

But so is learning from the book of life.

I’m pretty sure I gained much more insight into the way the world works by being smacked upside the head during a neighborhood snowball fight than I ever did from reading The Wife of Bath’s Tale.

And apparently, others agree. For its mental and physical health benefits, there’s a lot to be said for a good old fashioned snow day.

And that goes for grownups as well as kids.

Every once in a while, we adults got to enjoy the benefits of an unplanned, frosty day at home too.

By the 1990s, the online world had grown to the point where many of us could “log on” to work from home.

So, when big storms were in the forecast, we were sometimes told to take our laptop computers with us, and work from the comforts of our house.

That meant a 30-second commute to your kitchen table workspace, and the ability to work in one’s PJs.

Connectivity was a wild card, so with no guarantee you’d be able to tap into your work Intranet, you basically had yourself an unscheduled free day. I’ll never forget the time I asked a work colleague whether her workday at home was productive and she told me, “it sure was. My daughter was off school, and she and I baked cookies!”

Today, my sense is there is a lot of “cookie baking” going on in the new, post-covid, work-from-home environment. Lots of pajama wearing too.

All day, every day.

That’s the problem: working from home is no longer a special treat.

We’ve gotten used to running a load of laundry at lunch and dressing for the workday as if we were going on a summer canoe trip.

So, in a sense, we adults no longer get “snow days” either.

I miss them.

I miss the break in the routine. I miss these impromptu vacations - this little bit of welcomed chaos - where nothing is planned, no meetings need to be held, there are no spreadsheets to examine, and there’s not much to do on your “to-do” list.

Each month as I write these mashups of nostalgia and amateur philosophy, I do so from a room that looks out on a beautiful stand of trees that annually morphs from the greens of summer to the reds and yellows and oranges of fall.

Today there is snow on those trees.

Sometime this week, there may be more.

In the morning I’ll turn on the radio to hear most schools are not taking a snow day, but instead are invoking their “virtual learning schedule.”

I won’t hear any mention of businesses at all.

And then I will realize it.

I really miss snow days.

As always, thanks for reading.