I've never been much of a weather watcher, or a weather talker. It is what it is, I used to say. Compulsively tuning into meteorologists' predictions only opened an opportunity for me to run out and get milk before the blizzard came. But I'm cracking now. I listen to the news slack-jawed as weathermen gesture excitedly at maps and point to the next winter storm moving across the country. I stand in the doorway and see trees covered with snow, and streets, and houses, and towns. There's an eight-foot-long, one-foot-thick icicle hanging from an eave outside my office window. I've given up pushing snow off my car with the little auto brush and now just use the broom. I feel like I live in Alaska. Or Siberia. Or on some planet where spring never comes. Or in Hell, where we've been hoodwinked into believing it's hot and where in fact it snows every day, all day, for the rest of a miserable bone-chilling eternity.
It's snowing again right now. Another bunch of inches expected. Two inches, six, ten, a million. What difference does it make? I used to think snow was pretty, those dreamy flakes drifting out of a murky sky. Serene white fields. White-tipped pine trees. Now the flakes might as well be bits of asbestos as far as I'm concerned, or a swarm of locust. We are locked in a freezing mountain of snow that won't melt (if it ever does) until June.
A Tennesee friend moans that Memphis keeps getting weather threats, but so far no snow. She wants to bundle in a flannel shirt and eat chili, put puzzles together, delight in an outside frosting that never arrives. Meanwhile I'm cruising around the Internet, wondering if I can get a cheap flight to Mexico. One-way.
On this Valentine's Day, many wintery miles from the sandy beaches of Cancun, I'm trying to feel the love...if not the romance...of snow. But as Ringo once said, it don't come easy.
