L U N A T A L K with Eva Moon

I was promised at least 6 inches

December 18, 2008 on 10:04 pm | Join the conversation. You know you want to. | In General Musing

Of snow. On Wednesday. We watched the windows all day. Not a flake.

One of my father’s jokes: Snowfall is like a one night stand: You never know how many inches you’re going to get or how long it’s going to last.

But that’s an old people’s joke. Now we have the National Weather Service. We have Doppler radar. A Google search of “local weather report” yields 181,000 results. We should be getting a good, long gander in weather’s pants.

Wednesday was an exercise in delayed gratification. The 100% certainty of snow turned out to be some other universe’s definition of 100%.

The ground did not get its carpet of white. At least we had our new carpet indoors, right? They were supposed to finish up installing it Wednesday. All that remained was the stairs. They arrived bright and early with the goods and started ripping and pounding. At the end of it they were… six inches short. We have a bare riser and not another scrap of carpet anywhere in sight. How can you install 2000 square feet of carpet and not have enough for one more stair riser? Hmmmm?

It’s on order now and will arrive eventually. They say.

The other six inches I was anticipating Wednesday finally arrived early Thursday.

We woke to a world pillowed and quilted in white. I know snow is no big deal to some of you. And I know it’s a big pain in the ass to some of you. But I was raised in mostly snowless climes, so it’s always a small miracle when it happens. We bundled up and trundled out before dawn. The snow was soft and drifting on the ground, fine and light as dust. Ankle deep and deeper. Tiny flakes swirled and glittered in the cones of light beneath streetlamps. Don’t sneer, snow people. Try to remember for a moment what it was like when you were a kid.

By the end of the day we had 11 inches. The street was full of children with sleds and snowboards and the air was sharp and glassy with cold. Another walk under streetlamps powdered our pants nearly to the knee and the snow gleamed violet in the darkness of the woods.

Maybe gratification is all the sweeter for being delayed.